Bill Nelson & OldChristmasLights.com

[Tim]

First off, I would like to welcome the recent members who have been lighting up the Christmas light collector's forum again!  Welcome aboard!

There has been a lot of talk here about Bill Nelson?s website, www.oldchristmaslights.com.   I am very sad to report that Bill passed away earlier this month, thus the disappearance of his website.  I considered Bill a good friend his presence will be greatly missed by all associated with vintage Christmas lighting.  At this time there is no plan to put his website back online but there is talk among other collectors about creating another site to help fill the void.  Nothing can of course replace Bill?s well researched site but perhaps a collaboration among Christmas light collectors will provide a well needed outlet to exchange ideas, information, and Christmas lighting history.


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Tim
Kilokat's Antique Light Bulb Site
Mountain Dew Collectibles, Volume I

[Chris W. Millinship]

Thanks for letting us know. This is very sad news, I had not been in contact with Bill for some time, but with the festive season just around the corner I did want to get back in touch see how things were going.


If it helps, the Web Archive site has this: http://web.archive.org/web/20040208180943/http://www.oldchristmaslights.com  which is a snapshot of Bills`s pages from back in February. I don`t know how deep the indexing went or how many of the images were saved because it *very* slow here right now, but it`s a start. It is likely Google has a pretty thorough cache too, only they do not usually store images.


 

[Tim]

Hi Everyone,

Bill's brother George Nelson has stepped in to manage the website and Bill’s Christmas lighting collection. Bill was in the beginning stages of starting a brand new site when he became ill. George will be undertaking the project now to fulfill Bill’s hard work and research. The new site will focus on electric Christmas lighting up until 1950 while a separate sister site was been planned to cover post 1950 Christmas lighting. This site will be managed by another volunteer collector.

I think this is great news and it’s wonderful to see OldChristmasLights.com shine again. Just in time for Christmas too!

[Hemingray]

With alot of googling, a complete archive of Bill's old site has been found here:

http://www.telmore.com/index2.htm

[Tom]

Paul Race is now keeping this website going at http://www.oldchristmastreelights.com