Life at the Home20

On a Thursday morning, not quite three years ago, a category 4 storm named Rita was churning in the Gulf of Mexico and making a beeline for Houston.  Katrina, which hit New Orleans the previous month, was fresh on everyone’s mind.  People were headed north on Interstate 45 in droves.  GetAlong was somewhere up north and the schools were dismissing classes early.  At the office, we weren’t getting much done other than watching the Internet updates and taking turns going to the grocery store around the corner only to find the parking lot full and the shelves empty of anything valuable during a power outage.  The phones weren’t ringing so when the storm became a category 5 hurricane around 4 p.m., management decided to let us go home or hit the highway if we chose.  I took the back roads home because of the traffic tie ups being reported on the local news stations.  All I could think about on the way home was, “Where is everything that needs to be protected in case we have to abandon the house and where do I put it?”

The first thing I did when I got home was empty two large plastic containers and begin filling them with the important papers which were kept fairly accessible in my file cabinet.  These would be put in the truck in case we had to leave.  Next came photos and as much genealogical paperwork as I could stuff into those containers.  And it wasn’t much relatively speaking.  The whole time I kept asking myself, “Why don’t you have all of this stuff stored on an external hard drive yet?”  Then all I would have had to do is disconnect the drive and put it in the car, ready to roll.

So here I am, three years later, ready to get with the program.  Soon all of my genealogical sources will have been digitized and stored on my huge hard drive for easy retrieval during those late night brainstorming sessions.  And as an added bonus, all those files will be copied to my external hard drive in case of a catastrophic event.  Now if I were REALLY smart, I’d have another external hard drive containing a second copy of those files stored at my dad’s house because I may not be able to get home during the next disaster, or, knock on wood, in case of fire.

So even though it seems like a daunting task, I firmly believe that it will be well worth the time and money invested.  Once it is brought up to date, it will be fairly easy to add sources as I find them on my research trips.  The only concern at that point is capacity of the drives on hand.  If they become too full, they may slow down and have to be replaced with larger capacity drives, but if done properly, this should not present a problem.  When technology advances over the next few years, I may have to consider converting the files to a new medium.  Time will only tell.

Luckily the storm weakened to a category 3 when it made landfall just east of Houston and we were able to ride it out at home, not that we could have made it anywhere else if we wanted.  We were without power for 2 days and watched Chinook helicopters fly low over the house, headed for the county airport before taking aid to the Beaumont area.  We were spared this time.

So unless you have a way to load your filing cabinets into the car at a moment’s notice, join me in your own Genealogical Scanning Project!

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Tags: Computers & Genealogy //