You are probably thinking that something broke on my new computer, and I lost my genealogy work. I can safely say my computer is fine, but my genealogy thumb drive is toast. To me this was a freak accident as I have never had a thumb drive break. This drive is but one of many that I have used over the years, and it could have maybe 4 years of my ancestry research images on it by my estimation.
This is what happened…
Moving Back
This happened because of my present location of my computer workstation. I was using a different recliner chair in the living room. I tried this new location for several months, and I finally concluded it felt wrong for the positioning of the distance of my laptop. I felt disjointed and could not do my genealogy work properly if this makes any sense.
I moved so as to have the stationary bike where I usually sat as I bike for 1 hour while we watch a television show on YouTube like “Escape to The Country” or “Antiques Road Trip.” We find the UK interesting and we always say let’s escape our country or move there to make it easier to travel to Germany to explore our roots. Anyway, I moved the bike to the other side and I will still be able to view the T.V. just as well.
I thought everything would move fine on the rolling expanding table and while pulling the table to its new location the laptop fell off. It seemed to fall screen side down and landed on our area rug. All seem okay until I was on my laptop and received notification that my thumb drive was disconnected.
Thumb Drive
I could see the problem right away, that the thumb drive was bent at a right angle instead of being straight. It should just slide in and out with the button slide. I first tried reinserting like it was to get it to work in order to copy everything to my computer hard drive. That didn’t work.
It is amazing that the internet had information about bent thumb drives and some trouble shooting you can try. I even watched a few videos. And was able to straighten it out and tried other things like trying to put pressure on the connectors and it did not work.
After I easily took off the case, I found out why. Because it got bent it pulled loose one of the 4 prongs that are soldered on and the only way to fix it would be to solder them back into place. Or it could be something inside where I can’t see. In any event I am not a computer technician.
My next logical step was Best Buy’s Geek Squad could help me. It seems this is out of the ordinary for them as the tech said he didn’t know of anyone in my area where I live could do soldering on something so small.
Did I?
As soon as Best Buy technician told me it was toast, I started thinking about my issue. One thing for certain I knew I didn’t manually save the images to my laptop hard-drive, but I hoped that maybe it was on automatic backup as long as I left the drive plugged in with OneDrive.
Sadly, it wasn’t saved to One Drive. You would think I would be upset as it had about 4 years of genealogy images. I was calm and maybe it was this calmness that I came to the realize that all was not lost. Or, should I say, only the images that I didn’t add to Ancestry were lost.
My thumb drive is the go between that holds the images that are restricted and can only be viewed at a FamilySearch Center. My typical routine would be to add the images the next few days to my private, but searchable tree on Ancestry.
My notebooks has detailed information when I find the image, that has the label “found” and “done” adding it to Ancestry, as well as the date I did each. What this means I will have some back tracking on only the images/records that I haven’t added to Ancestry.
By keeping my information and system, it will make the second time around super easy. So this is why when researching you keep detailed information as you never know when you need to go back to it. One other tip that I recently started doing is to save the indexed record to “Source Box” on FamilySearch. Click here to read about my 10 easy FamilySearch tools.
I periodically sync to Family Tree Maker to save my tree with images/records.
My New Safety Protocols
After, this freak accident I came up with some new safety protocols.
- Backup thumb drive to computer once a week.
- Once I add the image to Ancestry, sync to Family Tree Maker and then copy to my dedicated FTM thumb drive and store in a safe location.
- Research the FTM cloud service.
- Take my dedicated FamilySearch thumb drive out when not working on my tree and store in the appropriate place in my genealogy briefcase.
As the family genealogist, it is my job to safeguard the family ancestry and all my work. I guess I am more digital as my tree is mainly on Ancestry with a copy on Family Tree Maker. Where other genealogists might have all their work in binders. I do have a few binders and folders with documents, but I personally get more satisfaction with looking at my work I created online. I can always use the print options for reports and books on Family Tree Maker.
One thing I have done when babies are born in the family is send a print starting with the baby and going back x generations of their family ancestry. A nice phrase to close this post out is “Safety First”. Need I say more?
