I found a reference to a man, Anders, that I was researching. It was a reference to his drowning. I checked the death registers for the date that was given and sure enough, he was listed. So were two other men. There was a note squeezed into the margin. It was hard to read but the meaning was clear. Three farmers had gone out onto the lake in a boat on an early winter day and none of them survived. They were all buried the same day, longer than normal after they died, a hint that perhaps it had taken time to recover the bodies. On the date that he was buried, I found that Anders’s wife gave birth to his final child, a boy she named Anders. A sad and simple story of the kind that just waits for a genealogist to rediscover it.
The day after I discovered that story, it nearly slipped away again. My computer became hot and, unless I squeezed it in just the right way, the screen shimmered pink. Stories, facts, data and little details can all disappear. With a new computer and plenty of backups of the old one, nothing was lost. Data recovery is not always so easy.
Sometimes not everything is backed up but even bringing a little back can bring a thrill. If you ever do Irish research, you know just how much was lost there—so many records burned, destroyed as unnecessary, or reduced to pulp to make new paper. The 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 censuses are commonly regarded as having been totally lost during the Irish Civil War. Yet in some few cases there was a backup here and a document that survived there and and now the National Archives of Ireland has gathered and collated what remains of censuses enumerated almost two centuries ago.
Other information from those censuses survived in a different way. In 1908 a new pension system was instituted in the United Kingdom. To prove their ages, many wrote for extracts from the 1841 and 1851 censuses. Their names, ages, places of birth and parents still survive in those extracts even if the census returns themselves are long gone. Now what remains of those four censuses and the extracts made from them is online. They are both dazzling to see and saddening to see because they make clear how much information was lost. At least they are not quite gone.
Do you have backups of your data?