Toward
the beginning of the year I was finally able to start sorting through many of
the items that I tossed in my desk in an initial effort to get everything put
away shortly after we moved into our new home. While there were countless pens
that needed to be organized and old power cords and technology that needed to
be tossed, there were also a number of digital storage devices that piqued my
attention as I rescued them from the grips of the office clutter.
Once
I consolidated everything into a couple of plastic sealable bags (one for SD
cards and the other for flash drives), I shoved them into a pocket in my work
bag with the plan of scanning the contents later in the week. A few days and
then a week passed without even a single look. Then, having accidentally pulled
one of the bags out by the corner while retrieving my laptop, I unsealed both
bags and slid the first of about a dozen SD cards into my computer.
I
was actually quite surprised when I found absolutely nothing. However, that was
the only empty card as each of the others contained the photos from all of our
summer trips from the past several years. Great items to hold on to for the
current twigs of the family tree but nothing much more than that. Thankfully
when I plugged in the first, and the oldest, flash drive into my computer,
there were a multitude of documents that I hadn’t seen in at least a decade
(not really a surprise given that I remember this 256kb card being the first I
ever used). And as I loaded more and more into my computer, I was able to pull
older photos, documents, and the entire digitized genealogy binder that my
great aunt put together.
Not
satisfied with these rediscoveries I tried to think of all the other means of
digital storage that I have utilized over the years… this lead me to pulling
out my wife’s old external hard drive as we both used this 1TB monster for many
years and it primarily served as our joint computer backup in the past. Well,
on this I found even more photos and documents that I had long since forgotten
about including the random pieces that I had come across years ago… items that
I still don’t know if they are relevant to our family tree.
The
digging was almost done as there was still a group of pictures that I had yet
to find. Well, actually, I had found them some time ago stored on Shutterfly
but only in low resolution. I wanted the originals, I wanted to see the
memories from our wedding and honeymoon the way that I remember them… as clear
as the moment they happened. A few boxes and CDs later and these too where
added to our story, our small leaves in our ever-growing tree. It’s nice to
have most of the pieces together for at least one generation.
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