Tears & Joy is an autobiography written by Josephine Reinhold. The Book contains pictures and documents with captions and tells her story about growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, marrying, raising twelve children on a Wisconsin dairy farm & retiring.

The following links are to Tears & Joy.

Back Story

My name is Lawrence Reinhold. One day Mom decide to write her Book. She bought a computer and printer and started typing. I say typing because from my mother's point of view, a computer was nothing more than a fancy typewriter. At the time, she did not know anything about computers or software, and for some reason, her computer overwrote part of her data files. The overwritten data files caused my mother to lose part of her Book. She printed all the pages as she wrote, so she had her Book in its entirety. One day, she called me and asked if I’d help straighten out her Book. I was in my early 30s at the time and had no idea the work I was in for when I agreed to help.

Mom gave me her hard copy, the electronic files that survived, and the pictures and documents that she wanted included in her Book. I burned through hundreds of hours trying to reorganize her electronic data to match her hard copy. I finally gave up. In the end, I bought a scanner and software. I scanned her entire hard copy into a word processing format. At the time, scanners were relatively new and they were expensive. The scanning software wasn't too reliable. It wasn't easy connecting the scanner to my office computer network, and it was expensive. I learned to run scanning software for pictures and text. I scanned her photos and documents, which of course I scanned incorrectly, so later, I had to rescan almost every item because I scanned them in too low a resolution, or the size was too small, or the color was wrong, or I scanned the item in the wrong format. Also, due to the scanning software’s inaccuracies, it took hundreds of hours to match Mom’s hard copy to the electronic file for her scanned book.

In all, Mom’s Book was a mess. At best, it was a very rough, first draft. There were large gaps between the times when she wrote. Mom did not go back and read what she wrote before starting to write again. She simply started writing. So, there was a lot of duplicative commentary covering the same event or period.

As I worked on her Book, I called Mom and asked about the chronology of events and wording. Every time I called, Mom would immediately start with, “Don’t you change what I wrote!” I always assured Mom that I did not change what she wrote. I explained that the text did not read right, or did not make sense, or the chronology was wrong, and so on. I did not “change what Mom wrote.” I eliminated duplicative text. I move extraneous text to footnotes. I corrected the chronological order, sentence structure, word order, grammar, and tense. I slowly combined paragraphs.

Over the years, I sent Mom various drafts of her Book for her review. The work took thousands of hours; actually, it took years. Then, I started inserting her photos and documents into word processing files. I soon realized I had huge files that crashed the software and corrupted the files.

In the end, I hired a graphics and computer person to help me. The graphics person recommended that I start using very expensive, professional grade layout and graphics software to process the graphic files. She told me what the graphic files parameters should be for printing and the computer person taught me how to scan the items within those parameters. Once I upgrade my software and hardware, I did the entire layout for Mom’s Book. I converted her text from word processing software to layout software and added the graphic files. Once I completed my work, I gave the graphic and layout files to my graphics person to professionalize.

Mom’s Book didn't have any information about Dad prior to Dad marrying Mom, or certainly not much. I told Mom she should add information about Dad. She agreed, and I added a good portion of that information that came from my family research. I became interested in researching the Reinhold family history primarily because the Reinhold side of the family was supposed to have a different last name and no one seemed to know what it was.

Eventually, I wrote the last three chapters of Mom’s book. I compiled her letters, email, and cards that she sent me over the years, and from conversation I had with Mom. I first collected and sorted a huge volume of documents before I started scanning her letters and email. I typed in the text from her cards. I sent Mom drafts of the last three chapters for her review. I asked her to place quotes at the beginning of each chapter as she had done throughout her Book. That entire process took almost a year and did not include editing the text. Then I added pictures. It took several years to complete those three chapters.