From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:
it's Saturday Night -
time for more Genealogy Fun!!!
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:
A) We all need to document some of the special moments in our lives so we can recall them, or our descendants can learn more about us. Today’s question is “What was your Thanksgiving Day like this year?”
B) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.
Here's mine:
Thanksgiving 2002 was very quiet and peaceful. Just the way I like my days. I had spent the entire week excited that I only had to work three days and would be off four. There is always something that needs to be done around the house that I never seem to have time for during the week. I was looking forward to getting a few done over the holiday weekend.
I didn't make big plans for Thanksgiving Day since it is a holiday. I spoke with my mom via phone that morning. We usually Zoom for Thanksgiving and eat together, but she had been invited to a friends' for dinner. After our conversation, I turned on the CMA awards on Hulu and started organizing my financial records drawer. I was rewriting all of the labels on the folders, changing out worn folders, pulling out records from 2021, and throwing away paperwork that was no longer needed. I worked on this until about 12 pm when I decided I was hungry and would go ahead and cook my turkey casserole. I shared my casserole recipe on my last blog. You can see it here: Saturday Night Fun "Friendly Fill-ins" for Thanksgiving. While my lunch was cooking, I worked on my organization project a little longer, but I ran out of file folders. So I tabled that project for another time. I heated some blackeye peas and chopped some onion to go with my casserole, and enjoyed my Thanksgiving dinner. It was yummy.
After lunch, I spoke with my BFF in Georgia. It's just her and her husband, but she goes all out and cooks a big Thanksgiving meal. She'll pay for it tomorrow, but I'm sure it was good eatin' today!
I spent quite a bit of time earlier in the day sending texts of Happy Thanksgiving GIFs to friends, co-workers, and cousins. I wanted to let people know I was thinking of them.
Around 4:30, I decided to tackle a couple a couple of things with my computer and printer that I had been putting off for months. The first item on the agenda was getting my printer to "work" again. It had suddenly stopped communicating with my computer a few months ago. So I decided to get to it and figure out the problem. First thing I found was that the printer's power cord was unplugged on the back. OK, easy fix. Perhaps a cat managed to do that. I turned it on and printed a few test pages. Black print is choppy; color print is fine. So I clean the printheads. Black ink quits working altogether. I check the ink level... almost full. Hmmm... Then I check the wireless connection so that I can print from the computer, phone, etc. Evidently, when I had to change out my wireless modem a couple of months ago, I didn't update the printer with the new network name or password. So I entered the information and guess what! I can print from the computer again! I print a test page. It's in black so it comes out blank. I change the font color to red, print again, and it comes out perfectly. Of course, I don't have a spare black ink cartridge. So I go on Amazon, and order remanufactured ink cartridges for the first time. They had the same number of good reviews as the name brand cartridges do, and I got two cartridges for way cheaper than I would at Walmart!
I counted that as project completed, even if I do have to wait for the black ink cartridge to be delivered!
The other project was the one that terrified me a little bit. In August, a new update for Family Tree Maker 2019 was released. When I tried to download this update, I got an error message. I reached out to support and was told that I would need to uninstall my FTM and re-install the software with the new updated included. That had stopped me in my tracks. I hate updating software because it never goes smoothly for me. So for three months, I had been hitting the "Remind Me Later" button every time I opened FTM and it offered to install the update. But Thanksgiving afternoon, it was time. So I got the directions support had sent me and got to it. First, I did a backup of my file in FTM. (Do you keep multiple backups from different dates? Whenever I back up, I just keep the latest one.) Then I uninstalled FTM 2019 from my computer. When that was done, I rebooted. I had gone to the FTM site and gotten the newest version of the program (with the update included) so when my computer came back up, I was ready to download and install. I did that and everything went well. Then I restored my backup. Family Tree Maker 2019 syncs with my Ancestry.com family tree. I sync after almost every research session. I add a lot of Ancestry hints to my tree, so I download them to my FTM and keep both sites up to date. Or I do a stint of looking up Find a Grave memorial pages and enter information from there into FTM. Then I sync and the new information uploads to my Ancestry tree.
My next step, of course, was to try to sync the two trees. Just to test. Well, that's when everything went wonky. It started syncing and told me it had over 18,000 citations to sync. What?! I stopped the sync and checked that I had the right number of people in my tree, right date of back up etc. I did. So I started the sync process again. By this time, it is late, so I leave it overnight to do its thing.
And that was my Thanksgiving. There weren't any earthshattering, exciting moments here either, but I enjoyed it. I get a feeling of accomplishment from getting projects done. And I am thankful for the time to do these things.
As all of you know, I am most thankful for my Mama. I will see her in January, and we will celebrate being together then. From our viewpoint, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day are just days on the calendar. We can celebrate each other any day of the year.
I am also thankful for the cousins I have met along the way. Each one is special to me, and I look forward to seeing a couple of them in January.
Last, but not least, I am grateful that during this last trip around the sun from Thanksgiving 2021-2022, my BFF and I found each other again. Relationships are hard, and I'm not very good at them. However, sometimes you have a strong enough friendship to just drop back, re-group, and come back stronger than ever.
P.S. Oh do you want to know what happened with the software upgrade? It ended up being a 48 hour nightmare. First time I contacted support, I was told that it was normal for the first sync to take awhile, because this updated version of FTM is made to make syncing more accurate and thorough. OK. Still wouldn't sync. It would get so far and freeze. Contact support again and after much run around and repeating myself, it was decided I needed to re-upload my FTM tree to Ancestry. I started that project this morning (Saturday). After doing all that, I had to delete my first tree from Ancestry since I didn't need two exact trees there. Then I needed to change the names of trees back to what they were (Georgia Tapley Tree) so it would make it easier for folks to find it on Ancestry. Then I did a couple of syncs to make sure that worked. It was about 5 pm today before I got back to where I was before this upgrade. Did I mention I hate software upgrades?
