It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to:
ADNeditor@ancestry.com

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

Have a great day!
Juliana

Keep Your Back-Up Media Current
Lenore Sroka

Three years ago I did a series of interviews with an elderly aunt and got some wonderful stories about her family and particularly her sister--my grandmother. I dutifully transcribed the interview tapes on the computer and saved a back-up copy on a floppy disk. We have since updated our computer from Mac to PC and of course there is no floppy drive. I took the disk to work where there are still some Mac hold-outs, inserted the disk and got the “format” message. Over the course of three years, the disk had deteriorated and is unreadable. Even our in-house computer guru could not extract the information. Fortunately, I still have the cassette tapes of the interviews, but the lesson is: don’t assume that those old back-up disks will last forever. This one was not exposed to light, dust, etc. and still the information was lost!

Special Effects Can Make Reading Easier
Sara Binkley Tarpley

Not only can you scan and enlarge difficult-to-read documents, but you can try special effects on them. I have had success reading some words by temporarily turning on the "emboss" feature that makes the letters look three-dimensional.

Cemetery Computer Troubles
Beth Gubbins

I had a problem recently with my grandmother's grave not being located in the cemetery's computerized records. They had asked me if she was perhaps in a cemetery up the road, and I said no, because I had been at that cemetery before and had visited her grave (although it has been some time). They ended up pulling their books to locate her, and it turned out to be a spelling error, misread from the handwritten notes previously entered on their books. So if you know a person's name and are absolutely certain they are at that particular cemetery, ask for them to check their books or to suggest various alternate spellings that might have been entered in their computer.