Off-site storage saves genealogical data

As some of the readers of this blog may know, I'm a Houston resident. Our recent crisis with Hurricane Ike has left million without power and hundreds of thousands of homes severely water and wind damaged or destroyed. For countless millions, their heirloom pictures and documents are ruined, lost to Ike's heartless menace. Genealogically, this is a tragedy.

As many readers of this this blog may not know, I'm also a former Florida resident and a seasoned hurricane survivor. When I began the Colvin Study, one of my first orders of business was to scan as many of my heirloom documents and then store them off-site, using a subscription-based remote server making the images of the documents safe in the event of a crisis. Times like these prove to me the wisdom of that decision because I have the comfort of knowing that all of those scanned documents are safe.

I am grateful that my residence did not suffer disastrous wind or water damage, and that all of the written raw data that I've amassed over the past few years has not been compromised. Still, the lesson of off-site storage has proved worthwhile, and I would sincerely encourage any researcher of any genealogic interest or beneficiary of the Colvin Study to heed the same lesson.