DSL Yeah!, DIRECWAY boo, Old Cambridge District

Well the greatest news in a while is that I finally have DSL installed. We live in a very remote area and having been spoiled for many years with a Road Runner cable ISP, the best thing that was available in this area was a satellite Internet connection. It was OK, but kind of clunky. There is a delay on every connection or message due to the distance that the signal has to travel to the satellite and then to return to earth.

The telephone company here has been pushing for new DSL customers and I was thrilled to hear that it was available. The installer came a day earlier than scheduled and just left the kit off with a note that I could try to install it myself or he would return if needed. Oh the other unusual thing is that their tech support people actually ARE available 24/7, and they are here in New York State, and speak ENGLISH! Go figure.

It took about twenty minutes to hook everything up, load the software, sign on, and voila VERY high speed, no delays and on all the time. I could not cancel my DIRECWAY account soon enough! This is way cool. Blazingly fast and no disconnects.

All email from now on should go to nygenes@gmail.com , so if you have me in your address book with some other email address please change it.

I sent out a broadcast to a few Upstate NY county mailing lists today and was pleasantly surprised with the massive amount of hits that my website received. I am now in contact with a lady who has done extensive work on some of the families of the Old Cambridge District, my most near and dear project, and we will be sharing quite a lot of data on families that I am quite familiar with, but not related to, (yet). \grin/

Computer Crash, LEGACY notes gone, FastStone Image Editor, Abel HOWARD, Jr., NYS Civil War Research

Had some very unusual computer problems. The Internet became extremely slow, I could not flip between multiple programs that I had running, and the whole operation became very sluggish. I ran every type of malware utilities that I own, such as AVG Anti-virus, AdAware, SPYBOT Search and Destroy, Pest Patrol, and probably some others that I do not remember, but nothing seemed to fix it.

Then I had a real scare. I was working on my main genealogy program LEGACY, and noticed that ALL of my notes were gone! 20,000 people and most all of the entries have some type of note attached, GONE! Yikes!

So I went on the LEGACY Users Group and asked the question and received five very good, common sense approaches to fix the problem. One was to save the file under a different name and then check it, nope, one said make a GEDCOM and look at the gobbledy gook of the GEDCOM with a text editor, and yes the notes were there in the GEDCOM so I calmed down a little.

Another said reload the GEDCOM under a different name, nope, still no notes. The one that finally did it was to do a “System Restore” to an earlier date. I never thought of that but I should have because I actually am one of the few people that deliberately create a System Restore point periodically, especially after some major overhaul, or new bunch of program entries. WINDOZE XP does make automatic periodic restore points, not every day, but quite often, so I restored to a couple of days previous and that did the trick.

I still do not know why the system got corrupted, and I made three good LEGACY program back-ups right away, one on the hard drive and two on CD-ROMs, one of which I store off-site. I urge ALL readers to do the same VERY often!

I just installed FastStone Image Viewer which is a free image editor program that looks quite promising and has some very handy edit utilities, and the part I like best is the ease of titling photos and scans, categorizing them and adding copious notes and comments. These images can then be exported into LEGACY with all of the notes attached. Have not used it much but expect to in the next few weeks.

Just got an email from the Whitley County, Indiana Record Center that they have Abel HOWARD Jr.s Guardianship file and will photocopy it and send me a copy for $16.00. Will send for the copies because I do not have too much info on Abel Jr. who on the 1860 and 1870 census called himself “Abraham”.

Have added a new page to my website www.ny-genes.com for people interested in doing Civil War research in New York State. Check it out, down at the bottom left column of choices.