Family Surname Christmas Tree

I would like to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas and all the best for 2015...

Love Languages? Historical roots of language . . .

I was reading something really interesting today on another website with an amazing diagram which really shows the history of languages in a nutshell (I realise it's not 100% accurate but think it depicts the development of the many languages over the centuries . . .

Feast Your Beautiful Eyes on this Beautiful Linguistic Family Tree

Image link - accessed 26th October 2014

I'm back...

Our real Black Forest Cuckoo Clock

Yes, this is my first blog post in about 2 months, but I'M BACK!

I am sorry that I have neglected all my regular readers during the summer, but it has been a very mad and crazy summer. This is what we were upto...

• we visited my brother and his family in the Black Forest in Germany, where we purchased a beautiful cuckoo clock for our new house

• we moved house, only around the corner but to create more space for my family tree

• we visited Wales for my sister-in-laws wedding, which was so pretty and beautiful . . . 

• AND the most exciting news is that the family tree grew another little person larger and let's say the introduction to parenthood has been a very intense but also a majorly exciting time for us.

I am hoping to get back to the blogging and also my research eventually but it might not be quite as frequent as my previous blogging was.

A word of wisdom . . . BACKUP!

All family historians must ensure that they backup their family tree regularly . . .

. . . a few weeks ago, I had been busy all day working on my family tree using Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2010 on my MacBook. I was inspired and on a roll finding records, it was a really enjoyable day.

My new FTM for Mac

Later on some friends came around so I left my laptop playing some music but had not shut down FTM, so it had not saved up that days work. When I came back to my laptop later that evening I discovered the battery had died whilst it was playing music and my laptop had powered off itself. In turning my laptop back on and opening FTM it was telling me the file had corrupted . . . EEK!!!

Anyways to cut a long story short with a few tears en route, I thought that I had lost ALL my data (talking about 5 years worth of research possibly more!!). I rung FTM at Ancestry to see if they could offer any help or assistance . . . they couldn't as not only had the file corrupted but the FTM program on my laptop had also corrupted. Every time I opened a back-up file it was also corrupting that, but also my FTM had not been backing-up in a separate file every time it shut down even though the tick box was ticked that it should be doing that, so my now corrupted file was the only back-up I had for the last 2 years   :(

Thankfully my saving grace is that I backup my laptop regularly to an external hard drive :) so had a fairly recent copy of my research through a FTM back-up. I have had to buy a new version of FTM program as well, which arrived in today's post (including 6 months free membership to Ancestry).

I am hoping and praying that I will be able to use the non-corrupted files from my external hard-drive to download as much of my family tree onto the new FTM this weekend and get my head around the newest version of FTM for Mac . . . so here's to hoping it all goes smoothly in the transition from old to new and backed up data.

The moral to the story is back-up very regularly and never leave your laptop on playing music without it being plugged into a power source!!!!