Ancestor Approved Again

The Ancestor Approved Award, originally created by Leslie Ann Balou of Ancestors Live Here is still making the rounds in the blogging community. I am overdue to recognize and thank Jirene's Genealogy Tips for recently sending the Ancestor Approved Award this way again.

The Ancestor Approved Award asks that the recipient list ten things you have learned about any of your ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlighted you. Since I have already received this award, you can read about them here.


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

The Day After Data Backup Day

Amy's Genealogy, etc. Blog has a recent post titled, Digital Youth and Digital Preservation that caused me to look at Data Backup Day a little differently this month. It discussed an interesting film at the Library of Congress about youth and digital preservation and got me to thinking about the importance of digitally preserving information belonging to the young adults in our household.

The films refers to youth today as Digital Natives, having grown up in a digital world. Well, the Digital Natives in my household really haven't put much thought into how to digitally preserve and protect their own digital information.

Due to recent circumstances the time is right to approach the Natives about a solution. Younger Child is going to have to send the laptop in for repair. When I asked what information on the computer, if lost, would be devastating, the response was, "My pictures. I like to look back on my pictures." I then asked if there was a copy of those pictures anyplace else. Of course the answer was no. So we set Younger Child upwith an online backup service in the cloud. Younger Child was very open to this, so now it's a done deal.

Older Child recently experienced a broken pipe in her building after the recent freeze, which caused significant flooding. Older Child suddenly has a new appreciation for concepts like insurance and hopefully data backup, which we will be discussing in a few days.

I hope you, and your family, have backed up your data recently!


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

Winter on the Beach - Wordless Wednesday



Winter on the beach.

© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

It Takes A Thief - Discharge Papers



 A while back, I wrote about breaking into the locked “safe” in my parents’ basement. Inside were numerous papers belonging to my grandparents. One of those items, I was particularly excited to discover was my grandfather's World War I discharge papers. Initially I thought they were the originals but upon closer examination I noticed they are a notarized copy. If you're familiar with the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center, you know that this is quite an exciting find.

The Enlistment Record portion expands on some of the details of my grandfather's service. This should help me verify information that I've pieced together from other sources and provide a more complete timeline. Down at the bottom in the notary area, it states that my grandfather has the original in his possession. I'm still hoping the original will turn up and have no doubt it might.

I also noticed Grandpa recorded his discharge papers with the Spokane County Auditor upon his return from the war.

I can see why Grandpa kept his discharge papers locked up and am thankful that he did.

© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

Photo by Marcin Wichary

Rescue From The "Chemical Sandwich of Doom" on Sorting Saturday

During a recent sorting episode, an album turned up in the Family Home. Husband and I were the star subjects as it was an album of snapshots from our wedding day, taken by the unofficial photographer (aka Dad)! I gasped in horror when I opened the album and saw what was inside. The pictures were neatly arranged in one of those horrible sticky "magnetic" albums that we now know are dangerous for our beloved photographs. Hence the name, Chemical Sandwich of Doom, given by one of my favorite archivists, Sally Jacobs, The Practical Archivist. (You can read even more about the Chemical Sandwich of Doom here.)

I decided to try out my new Flip Pal on this album. So one evening while watching TV, I carefully removed the pictures one by one, scanned them using the Flip Pal, and placed them in a new archival safe album. When the scanning was done, it was easy to load the pictures onto my laptop, in one batch, using the following filename format:

LastName_GroomBride_YYY-MM-DD_wedding

As a side note, I also found a "Mother's Album" containing pictures from the same day whose materials were much friendlier to photos than the Chemical Sandwich of Doom. You could definitely see the difference in the condition of the pictures between the two albums.

Another rescue mission accomplished.


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

Early Cherry Blossoms - Wordless Wednesday

Early cherry blossoms in the Pacific Northwest.

© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

Calculators - 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History -Week 8

With the rapid technological advances in personal computing and the popularity of the World Wide Web over the last couple of decades, it’s hard to believe a handheld calculator was ever considered revolutionary. This baby was a huge deal in our family. Not only would it perform the basic functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, it had a memory, would calculate square root, sine, cosine, tangent and all kinds of other functions that a high school student would need (and that I can no longer remember)!


Consider this: in just a few short years we went from the stone age tools of the slide rule

And the adding machine that had been around for decades,

to a hand held calculator that would add, subtract, multiply, divide, and store the results

To the TI 30. And so on...

It really is similar to the rapid increases in power we have seen in personal computers in the last several years. Actually it is the early stages.

I am just happy that I never had to learn how to use a slide rule!

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin, of The We Tree Genealogy Blog, is a series of weekly blogging prompts in 2011to encourage you to record memories and insights about your life.

Slide rule photo by Tsuyoshi Adachi as thin-p

All other photos by Michelle Goodrum

© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum