New Year resolution number 1
You don’t get more dedicated to her family history than Diane Linsday but even she has the occasional slip-up. Here she shares a rueful tale which hopefully will remind you to back up your research right away
My French language teacher regularly scrawled the word médiocre across my homework. Médiocre as in, poor, mediocre, indifferent, middling, ordinary, ropy. (Come on, Miss J. which one was it? I personally lean towards middling, but ropey… Moi? Mais non! Jamais! See, je still remembaire, et je snappe ma fingaires at vous Madame!
Apart from teaching English to A level I don’t consider myself professionally qualified in much at all. I’m largely self-taught. I do some things well, some things indifferently and some badly, like singing, cross stitch and anything remotely athletic. In the middling skill-set, I’m not a bad cook and I can handle a sewing machine, but for sheer amateur expertise, ask me about the Kings and Queens of England, any play by Shakespeare or my extended family tree and I can have you asleep in minutes with the sheer power of my eloquence. Ask my husband if you don’t believe me.
And I make mistakes. I’ve taught Family History quite successfully over the years because I know the pitfalls, having fallen into most of them. Which makes the events of this week hard to comprehend. Again, ask my husband. It was he who metaphorically waved the vinaigrette beneath my nose as horror slowly dawned and an unforeseen Windows update on my PC gobbled up my ancient Generations Family Tree software, complete with all data.
I can hear the gasp of reader shock from here. ‘Was it backed up?’ I hear you whisper. Well no. Not exactly. Not recently. Not, since this time last year, on the external hard drive on my desk, installed by the same solicitous husband. ‘It might be longer’, I whisper. The explosion of husbandly exasperation still hangs heavily from the walls and ceiling of this study like the cobwebs in Miss Havisham’s bridal chamber.
However, (when I could get a word in edgeways): I do have up to date versions of my full extended family tree: i) on my PC in Roots Magic, Treeview and a copy of Family Historian to which I’ve temporarily misplaced the product key; ii) online in Ancestry, Findmypast and Thegenealogist iii) on my posh scary Macbook in Reunion, the powerful IOS updated version of dear old Generations which I have been promising to fully master for …well… some time; and iv) a nearly current version on my old
About the author Diane Lindsay has been addicted to family and local history for more years than she cares to admit, still teaches it to anyone who will listen, and often slips it cheekily into her creative writing class. She has enough brick walls to keep her going for many years and plans to live long enough to knock down every one. She finds it very hard to take herself too seriously.
laptop in a still fully working copy of Sierra’s Generations Grand Suite which, with the internet disabled, still works perfectly on Windows 7.
I also have several large box files containing paper copies of everything I’ve found, been given or discovered, and hundreds of saved Word files containing census and BMD images, individual family histories and other ‘stuff’ of miscellaneous origin. I almost forgot the fully up to date versions on my ipad in both Reunion Touch and the Rootsmagic app, plus assorted Gedcom 5.5 files on memory sticks. I even have a version on my phone!
I knew it was coming – though I got complacent. It was like losing a familiar friend, the end of an era. This was the stuff of genealogical history, software I’ve loved since the 1990s. I followed it through all its manifestations, from Leister Reunion 4 for Windows 98, Sierra Grand Suite, Generations Family Tree, right up to (and after) its demise in 2011. Despite the awful warnings, it worked perfectly for me, lost no data and even installed and worked seamlessly on Windows 10. Until it didn’t.
I do hope you learn from this cautionary tale and back up your data in every way including on paper. Me? I’ve dried my eyes and moved on, wiser, rueful, slightly out of my depth for now in a vast uncharted technological sea; ironically, I’d also just installed the all singing, all dancing Microsoft Office 365 in place of the now defunct Word 2010. 2021 is going to be a huge learning curve. Mais c’est la vie dans l’histoire de la famille mes amis! And no, I do not now speak fluent French. But I do have an obliging translation website that never tells me I’m useless!