About Virtual Sherwoods and the Sherwood family

Welcome to the Sherwood family's little patch of — well, it isn't 40 acres, more like a hundred megabytes. Virtual Sherwoods began as a New Year's resolution: every month of 2001, Keith would write a short letter with photographs describing what the family had been up to, and publish it here for friends and relatives. The goal was a time capsule for posterity (that would be Brad and Doug) that also kept distant family current without the mounting cost of postage.

The idea outlived the year. Monthly editions ran from January 2001 through 2005, growing from hand-made beginner pages to a fuller site with a live-in house-remodel diary, church photo galleries, a Boy Scout history, and a mountain-climb story. After 2005, the family's photo efforts moved to albums elsewhere; for the 2011 season Keith revived the format once more for a single Now and Then reunion edition.

The cast

• Keith — the writer, programmer, photographer, and (by his own account) maker of birthday pancakes.
• Kristi — co-star, keeper of the household, and frequent first-mate on family outings.
• Brad (Bradley) — born in late December 1992; skateboarder, baseball player, geography champion, Pacific Crest Trail hiker.
• Doug (Douglas) — born 1995; karate kid, rec-league baseball, coffee-house singer, and the source of the journal's best quotes.
• Dancer — golden retriever, adopted in 2003, nemesis of jackhammers and friend of contractors.

Where the name comes from

The family name is Sherwood; the site playfully borrows "virtual" to promise more than the average web page. Nothing here is deep — but it is real: five years of a family's ordinary, over-scheduled, occasionally chaotic life, written down while it happened.