Eighty Years Ago

The reading I have been doing recommends that no genealogical information be posted that is newer than what happened eighty years ago. That stumped me as I started to question how best to share the family stories that will become our record of history.

The reasoning for the eighty years deadline is that census records are made public at that time and so that information is public records. Yes, the fourth generation ago may be deceased but that eighty-year old public information exposes private information of the generation of our parents. I've read that AARP may even ask that census records be kept private longer as the population of centenarians increase.

I'm looking for stories of my great-grandparents' generation to post. The stories from our ancestors born in the last half of the nineteenth century, these ancestors who are sixteen or higher on our pedigree charts that have my children as 1 and me as 3. I know their names: David Smith Chesnut, Sara Adeline Harvey, John G. Lauerman, Clara Wittkugle, Theodore Lincoln Rogers, Altazera Sayers, Albert Kinder, Lettie Rusk, William F. White, Eliza White, Henry Beasley, Martha Jane Pease, Albert Lester Powell, Lora Mae Anthony, Taylor Elwood Dunn and Ida Mae Waitman. My curiosity got me that far, and yet I want to know more about what their lives were like and how that influenced their choices and opinions.

I mean, these people were born before James Naismith invented basketball. What did these people do in March before basketball?