FORWARD TO THE HTML EDITIONS (First Page)

     This is not part of the original book.

     In 1979 Lionel Dane Melvin published his first book about the genealogy and history of the Melvin family, "Lest We Forget ; Our Melvins And Kin". When the first printing eventually sold out, Lionel decided to publish a second edition, but never had the opportunity. However, while "Lest We Forget" was still in print, he published a second book, "Remember Our Melvins And Kin". "Remember" mostly covered those branches of the Melvin family which had moved out of the Carolinas. Copies of it are still available from Lionel's daughter, Sandra M. Gray, of Charlotte, NC.

     In the past twenty-five years, the enormous advances in electronic storage and retrieval, word processors and text editors, and electronic mail and the Internet has completely revolutionized book writing and publishing. It is now possible to re-type "Lest We Forget" with only a fraction of the effort that it cost Lionel and the people who assisted him. This current project is to do just that: type "Lest We Forget" into a text editor, so the words will exist in electronic form. Once that is done, the text can be corrected, updated, and published with far less effort than it took originally. It would be possible eventually to use scanning and character recognition software to do this, but at the present time, typing is perfectly feasable.

     This Cousin of Lionel's started typing on May 26, 2004. The pages are typed in HTML form. Each page is as true a copy as possible of Lionel's original work, even down to the punctuation. However, typographical errors are corrected, and errors of substance, such as an unlikely date, are typed in red. Also, unusual spellings of names, which may be correct, but which cannot be confirmed immediately are typed in red.

     The completed files, one page at a time, are copied to a different directory (folder) and corrections that Lionel had made after the original publication are applied. These corrections from Lionel are typed in green. If Lionel corrected something that this typist had not put in red, that file is opened again and the old incorrect words are re-typed in red. Thus two versions are produced at the same time, a copy like the original book, with small corrections and possible errors put in red, and another version with Lionel's corrections added in green.

     This is written early on Saturday evening, September 11, 2004. At this stage, 53 of Lionel's pages have been typed since Wednesday, May 26, 2004.