Picking up the threads

One of my New Years resolutions is to resume my family history research. The most important file I lost in my hard disk crash was a spreadsheet which acted as an index to my research; it had a list of all my family names with columns for BMD dates and whether I had the corresponding certificates as well as whether I had Census entries for them. I'm having to recreate this file from scratch and its very painful.

I have paper files with the BMD certificates, so can thumb through those and type in the dates. The census information is a bit harder. When I originally looked the censuses up I saved electronic images of the respective pages and those have gone. Some of the information I had transcribed onto my web site and I have managed to recover some of those pages from the remains of the hard disk. Once I've finished taking stock of the information I have I will be in a better position to identify what is missing.

Fortunately I have several copies of my Family Tree Maker data file, as well as a paper print out of the Genealogy Book I created with it (though that appears to be a year or so out of date). I think most of my research is here somewhere, it is just a case of finding and re-indexing it.

The lesson is that you can't have too many backups, and it pays to keep information in a number of different formats.