Warning: Swear words
Since things have been so - what's the word? - frightening lately, I've been thinking about the possibility of having to evacuate my home, perhaps in a hurry, to escape whatever foreign or domestic shitbags may be invading or whatnot.
Being prepared to leave is always a concern, although we're usually thinking of natural disasters causing such a situation, but with the current guy in charge, our chances of some dumb political thing happening within our borders just went way, way up.
Along those lines, lots of "what ifs" are popping into mind - what if, after the shit hits the fan, I can't get to Ancestry, or we don't have electricity, or while fleeing the area, I forget to bring the laptop? How will I access my family tree? Maybe at that point, we won't really be worrying about such things, but my family history research is important to me, and I will want to have a copy with me.
Paper copies will become necessary at that point, but bringing a whole stack of notebooks isn't realistic, so I've decided to do something a little different. It's probably nothing that hasn't been thought of before, but it seems like a workable solution for the above problem.
At my workplace, I bought a stack of hole-punched white 3x5 cards with dividers, loaded onto a metal ring. On each card, I wrote the name of my direct ancestors with a number (1 for Dad or Mom, 2 for Dad or Mom's father, 3 for Dad or Mom's mother), along with their birth and death info, and burial place.
So here's how a card looks:
1. DAD'S NAME
Father: 2. Dad's Father's Name
Mother: 3. Dad's Mother's Name
Born:
Died:
Burial:
The numbering system is nice because it just doubles. Any father will be double the number of his child, and any mother will be double +1.
I'm thinking of also adding spouses, children, uncles (on blue cards), aunts (on pink), first cousins, records/sources for each fact, more possibly.
At any rate, I'm feeling good about this much more portable system of analog family history records.
