I nearly lost my family
Summer 2021
I am hoist by my own petard. I offer myself to you as skilled in internet matters and yet I have almost been caught out by one of the most easily foreseen and old fashioned of online pitfalls. One of the online services I have recommended for years has closed because it couldn’t make enough money. Fair enough, that’s life; but I almost didn’t notice, and so almost lost everything I had there.
For years I have been growing what became a very substantial family tree, with hundreds of people, photos and documents, using an online family tree template called Genoom. Other family members could see and edit it; my son managed to trace his mother’s family back to several probably mythical Norse semi-gods and established that she is the 19 times great granddaughter of a genuine 14th Century Iberian King called Pedro the Cruel. Happily, she doesn’t take much after that ancestor.
It only cost £15 a year, but this must have been its undoing. I logged in recently to be met with a single page announcing that the website was not ‘viable economically’ and was shutting up shop in two weeks.
To be fair, they did enable me to download everything, which I hastened to do, otherwise it would all be gone. Helpfully, it came as a Genealogical Data Communication (GEDCOM) file; this is a system designed for family trees. You just need appropriate software to open the file and there’s your family tree, reconstructed.
The question is, however, which software? I have failed, so far, to find a replacement online service that costs less than £130 per annum. Perhaps that’s the right price but it feels like a lot. After some research I bought Family Historian 7 for a single payment of £60; it’s British and works very well; in fact, it does far more than my old system did.
However, it feels like a step backwards for my family. The programme lives in my computer, not online, so I alone can see it, which makes collaboration impossible.
I suppose it will do until I can find an online system I can afford, but there is a wider lesson here: online services like Genoom, and better known ones like Spotify, Netflix, or for that matter, Zoom, eBay, Amazon and so many more, are not immortal. They will only exist if they make enough money or while some philanthropist keeps coughing up.
That means we should take steps to protect our online information; in the jargon, backing up.
We are used to making backup copies of what we store on our computers (or we should be) because Webster’s first rule of computing is ‘All hard drives fail eventually’; but how many of us back up what we store online? This might include your email, if you use Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail or your photos. Everything there is stored for you only by the good grace of the site owner, especially if you are not paying them anything.
They could easily suddenly decide to get out of the email business; Google summarily closed its Facebook equivalent not long ago.
So, if you have anything stored online that you don’t want to lose, I suggest that you consider arranging regular backups – or, more accurately, downloads – and store that downloaded information safely in one or two other places. The respectable online services make it quite easy, some even automate it, and it’s very reassuring. As one expert put it to me: if data is only in one place – online or offline – it’s not backed up.
I can’t imagine how annoyed I would be if our Family Tree were uprooted, especially the branch with Pedro the Cruel. And just think how fractious his shade might become if he were deleted.
A few links
Family Historian 7 – the software I have bought.
The biggest online site that helps you search for your family tree. Make sure that you can’t access it through your local library for free before signing up for a subscription – it’s far from free.
National Schools Register from 1870-1914 available to search free, but you must pay to see the results. Very frustrating, and does their reputation no good.
