Posting Member: Jenn & Jake
Topic: The broken-assed website! Project Armageddon
Family Name Associations: All
Location: The Moon.
Mood: I’m the Queen of Cream and Sugar. Jake likes it black, three sugar, stirred not shaken, in case someone was bringing us coffee…
Music:
Why? Because no matter how bad it is, you smile and sing along with the Unicorn song. SMILE AND SING!!!
It’s day 10 of project Armageddon. So to be clear, and explain exactly what’s happening on this end of the scale:
We had hosting issues, which have been resolved. In the midst of moving it was brought to our attention yet again there was more missing information from the website. Which lead to a third intense and final investigation into the ‘Broken Notes’ problem. Broken notes are when you go to the tree website and see a small note bullet, but no information. Now, TNG has fixed the issue of the Broken Notes, however, they didn’t fix our issue. In upgrading over the last 7 odd years – with a 2 edition gap of not upgrading after Barb passed away and we all took a much needed mental break – Something has just gone wrong. Is it anyone’s fault? No. TNG has a superior product that we have had no other issues with over 7 years. Darren himself looked into the problem when it started, it just can’t be magic wand fixed for us.
Can we upload from our backups? Yes, of course. Minus new information that’s been added in the subsequent years, which defeats the purpose. With no guarantee that while repeat upgrading in a similar fashion won’t recreate the information vortex of Broken Notes, which also defeats the purpose. The techs have been over every option at this point, and although there’s been some pretty creative ideas, it comes down to this. Nothing is going to work the way recreating will. That’s the bottom line.
Our Choices: Quit. Move to Fuji, get a boat, live on an island in the sun eating coconuts and fish. No, I’m not kidding. This ‘hobby’ is expensive, obsessively time consuming and this is a major setback which has frustrated the whole team, across the board. It’s 13 days until the opening of the exhibit and the First World War memorial, we should be able to focus on that without having to worry about how many hours it’ll take off the time table of Armageddon.
Quitting was a very real, very appealing choice.
In the 3 e-mails I’ve gotten this week – Starting Sunday – one person said thank you to me for what we’re doing.
Mr. Hogan, you deserve a cookie, just for being nice.
This morning a backup drive failed. We didn’t lose much of anything, some minor new changes to the website that I can recover – Much thanks to Mr. Squires for providing them in the first place.
It was just salt in an already raw wound.
Why we’re not quitting?
Since we began this little adventure that turned out to be a big huge adventure, we’ve met people online and in person that cannot be replaced. Cousin Joan, cousin Marilyn, cousin Claire who brought us a photo album and had the same Buddha statue. Cousin Patti, cousin Kerry, cousin Norry, cousin Richard. Mr. Squires who has been so generous with his time and information. I’m missing people here, but I think those reading will catch the drift. Please don’t send me a message if I was mean and forgot you, I’m apologizing up front!
The Lee’s and St. Vrain’s who constantly update us with little bits and pieces of this and that, who share with us and each other because they played such a vast part of American History. The Boxhall and Hedgecoe relatives that have reached out over the years to help with dates and places.
The Gill family can look at their family tree online in Alberta and British Columbia, despite Grandma Ruby’s near loss of sight. The Keffer’s and Diceman’s bring family photo albums that get scanned every August at their annual family reunion and then can see the photographs online.
Our Ancestors didn’t quit while coming to North America… And the point of this little project was always to share information freely. As long as that is being accomplished, we’ve committed to seeing it through.
I’ll be honest, we’ve committed to scanning family slides this month and the next. Armageddon wasn’t planned. It’s a huge frigging stressful pain in the butt. But Gran and Barb and Annie and Goldie and Gib and everyone that’s on these trees… Everyone that’s gone before taught us to keep our chins up and get the job done.
So, what we’ll gain from Armageddon: We get a roaring successful chance of taking a look at ALL our information and checking it over for mistakes. We also get the lovely chance of making new mistakes, we’ll look forward to the e-mails telling us all about them in the weeks after the new upload. We’ll also get to refile ever document we own, and implement a new filing system, Jake is crying right now, just so you all know… I’m sure those are tears of joy.
Geocoding will be accomplished, locations across the board will be uniform and placed. Fun, imaginary names made up by us or transcribers will cease to exist. We do ask for prayers, lit candles and divine intervention for peace when we get to Quebec. No one is looking forward to dealing with the place names in French that have been amalgamated for the last few hundred years.
Our current timeline suggests by September we should be able to post our new ‘family trees’ and take down the old ones. After which, we’ll be able to reload out 5500 some odd documents, photographs and headstones. Then we’ll be able to implement the changes waiting in a 17 page document of ‘changes to the trees’ that will, undoubtedly, be longer than 17 pages by then. At which point we will be able to reconcile with FindAGrave with great hopes that they’ve sorted themselves out, and we can continue uploading our images to their resources over the winter months.
So far we’ve reloaded the 500 some odd people of the Serdinksi – Gill tree, and are about 50 in on the Baker – Dorng tree. We began with both trees that have a high Scottish base purely because Scottish Censuses are transcribed, and most likely the highest at risk, unrecoverable notes. So far, we’ve saved 3 notes. But we are well aware that the older trees (McKenna and Berry) are most likely to have the most damage done. It’s just the best we can do!
It’s my greatest hope the most we’ve lost is a few Obituary transcriptions and a whole lot of FindAGrave memorial numbers.
There will be updates, mostly by Jake, I think, as we progress. He gets voted in for blogging because he’s so cute and charismatic! And with that update folks, I have trees to build and lunch to grab… Best of wishes to all of you reading, I hope you’re all well and happy.
