Sunday, February 28, 2016

Sunday Search: Digital Digging And Rediscovering


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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