A second cousin once removed recently emailed me about information about her great aunt. "Second cousin once removed" means one of her parents shares a set of great-grandparents with me.
The computer ghosts is that I have a lot of information about our shared ancestry but it is not readily available.
First, I interviewed her great aunt some years ago and have the interview on cassette tape. Problem is, I don't know where that tape is and if I still have extra copies.
Second, I have lots of information in computer files, but mostly in outdated media, like 3.5 inch diskettes.
Third, that information was created by a program I wrote and sold, but all that is on an outdated software system. For those with long memories, it was called Family Events.
Fourth, I still have a computer with that software system on it, but the computer is buried in a closet and needs lots of room to set up. And of course it needs time to set it up.
Fifth, is the information still on that old computer? I remember starting to erase all my data so that the computer could be recycled.
Almost every family has "ghosts", insubstantial personalities that we know very little about. But all the data that one descendant might have collected also becomes ghosts because it is not disseminated to other family members and replicated. This has happened with data on paper and data on computers.
