Calling all
Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again
-
time for some
more Genealogy Fun!!
Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing
has our assignment if we choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible
music, please!):
1) Thank you for this topic to Jacqi Stevens for her post today on Your Genealogy Go Bag on her blog A Family Tapestry.
2) My daughter Lori evacuated her home in the Santa Cruz mountains on Tuesday due to a large fire. Am I, or are you, prepared to react to a local disaster like a fire, earthquake, hurricane or civil unrest?
3) That prompted me to worry about "what genealogy/family history items would I take with me if I had 15 minutes to collect them?"
4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook post, or as a comment on this blog post.
Thank you, Jacqi, for prompting us to do this!
It certainly has been a tough seven days this past week.
Fires are raging all over the state, due to lightning strikes from a storm that
came through last Sunday. Many of the fires started in remote areas that are
hard to get to and, on top of that, we had over four 100-degree days. The many
small fires stretched the fire crews pretty thin. I am saddened by the loss of
Big Basin State Park. I had never been and shall have to be satisfied viewing
photos of the old buildings.
Our assignment is to make a list of what genealogy stuff we
would take if we have only 15 minutes to collect things and evacuate.
Wow, that is a hard one. My genealogy stuff is spread out
all over the house and I have not scanned everything yet. I have multiple
collections from different family members who have passed on: my father, my
grandmother, my dad’s sister, and my husband’s parents. Plus, we have our own
collections: 12 slide boxes holding 500 slides each, 8 Creative Memories photo
albums of photos not scanned, 8 plastic file boxes with paper files, plus many
boxes of original photos.
I have scanned many photos and they are saved to the cloud.
I have scanned most of the documents I have collected over the years, but not
any notes, nor have I digitized any audio files.
Fifteen minutes isn’t much time. I would also collect
medicine and clothes (including shoes—which I haven’t worn much since Covid). I
should probably grab a blanket or two and our pillows, whatever bottled water
we have, any cash on hand, and our wallets. I’d bring the laptop and charger,
phone and charger, maybe the ipad and charger, and my ukulele (and guitars?). I’m glad we currently have no
pets. I feel for those with livestock. We can’t get much in our car and we
can’t go far—it’s electric, so we should make sure it’s fully charged.
Thanks for the exercise. It is good to think about this and
create a plan.
Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.
Lisa, I know those fires must be up close to where you are, so this is a topic which we are all considering in this region right now. But you're right--those photos and files are all over the house. Almost like we need a genealogy triage process to decide which things are more important to save.
ReplyDeleteGood thing you have so much scanned and uploaded to the cloud. This is definitely a task that takes more than 15 minutes to accomplish! While many of us may have thought this would never happen near our homes, this unexpected shift will hopefully help us think out that much-needed contingency plan while we still have the time to do so.
I certainly need to do more scanning and organizing so I feel even safer about them.
DeleteI decided not to include the regular, nongenealogy stuff in my liar because that wasn't asked in the question. :) But I'm really impressed that you know how many photo albums, boxes of slides, etc. you have. That puts you far ahead of most people and will make it easier for you to plan your scanning.
ReplyDeleteI think most of the slides aren't worth scanning. I used to take photos of landscapes and buildings, rarely of people, which I regret now. My mother used to complain about that, asking "Where are the people who were with you?" My daughters won't care about shots of landscapes and buildings, though all the slides I have of PG&E hydro-electric powerhouses (inside and out) ought to find a home somewhere. I had imagined writing a book about them.
DeleteUnfortunately, we never know when Mother Nature or some other disaster might strike. Hope you are safe from the fire zone.
ReplyDeleteSo far, we are. There is an advantage of living in the middle of town, but we do have a few open space areas of dry grassland. Hopefully, there would be a little warning.
Delete