I will do it today. I will reach into a drawer filled with file folders I haven’t looked at in a while. These are files related to my Stuart ancestry. It’s time to get back to some research on them. They arrived in the U.S. from Scotland in 1852 and as you may have read before, they settled in the area of Fond du Lac and Winnebago counties of Wisconsin.

I will sort, relabel, and even toss some pieces of paper and likely find much to scan and to enter into the Master Genealogist. What is my impetus for all this?

Other than it just makes sense, I came across something I wrote several years ago. At that time I had been observing “the sobering amount of flood damage in the Midwest made me think about all that was lost.  Even moving their photo albums, baby books, receipts saved for tax purposes, business records, genealogy files, and other items to the second floor of some homes and buildings did not preserve them.” There will likely be much flooding around the country this spring as the large piles of snow melt. I will be sending some more scans on CDs to my sister. They will also be saved to an online backup system.

If I find anything that is amazing or leads me to do more research, I will let you know. Many other genealogists are using Super Bowl time to scan documents or participate in indexing records for FamilySearch. I decided that I need to do some work to clean up my files, first.

It never hurts to be prepared or to have helpful websites saved in your Favorites or Bookmarked in case of damage. Here are some websites with tips on saving items when disaster strikes:

U.S. National Archives & Records Administration: http://www.archives.gov/preservation/conservation/flood-damage.html

FindLaw.com: http://injury.findlaw.com/toxic-mold/flood-molds.html

Northeast Document Conservation Center: http://www.nedcc.org/home.php

Many state archives and/or historical societies have conservation labs that offer suggestions for dealing with flood and tornado damaged records and photos.

© 2011 – 2014, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.