Drinking from a firehose

My mom and I stopped in to see her first husband's mother twice last weekend. Saturday's visit was spur-of-the-moment; Sunday's was to bring her 7 1/2 ounces of navy yarn and the photos we'd talked about the day before. Although she's complaining about feeling weak, she's as sharp as a tack and keeping busy. In addition to making a pair of slippers for her son-in-law, she's trying to figure out what to make for each of the 32 people in her bible study group this year. Everything I thought of (dish cloths, Christmas tree ornaments, pot holders) she's already done once and doesn't want to repeat. Considering she's 102 and has been doing this for many, many years, coming up with ideas that are novel but not overly complex isn't easy.

( C. Davis with yarn and one of her daughters )

My mom called me a few minutes ago to ask if I had access to the family records. I said I do, some of them at least (thinking that our genealogy database never got put back online after the most recent hardware upgrade). She needed her first husband's birth and death dates. Five minutes later I was looking at a copy of his birth certificate and the little booklet dohickey from his funeral service and a minute after that I was talking to my mom telling her recollection was exactly correct.

As for the urgency, one of my brothers is interviewing for a new job, one that will require a passport. And to get a passport, he needs his father's information.

I thought I'd pinned down the birthplace of my maternal grandfather. According to Wikipedia, there are no less than three villages named Lúčky in Slovakia:

• Lúčky, Michalovce District


• Lúčky, Ružomberok District


• Lúčky, Žiar nad Hronom District

How on earth do I go about figuring out which one is right? Especially when I can neither speak nor read Slovak?

I had jebra update PhpGedView the other day. Afterwards, I got the following message on our family tree home page, but everything seemed to work properly.

ERROR:-1 DB Error: unknown error
SQL:SELECT * FROM pgv_media WHERE m_gedfile='3' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5 OFFSET 0 [nativecode=ERROR: function rand() does not exist HINT: No function matches the given name and argument types. You may need to add explicit type casts.]

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: numrows() in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpGedView-4.0.2-all/includes/functions_mediadb.php on line 551

Now I'm getting ready to go to the library to see if I can borrow one of their computers and log in to their genealogy database, and I find that I've lost *every* photo loaded into the database. Hopefully this is lost as in "PhpGedView can't find them" not "the photos were accidentally removed from the hard drive." If I have to re-link the photos to the database record, it'll be a pain in the ass, but do-able. If they've been deleted, I should have backups for 99% of the photos around here somewhere, but locating each individual photo and retyping the captions and providence of each photo will be a major undertaking. *sigh*

I had jebra update PhpGedView the other day. Afterwards, I got the following message on our family tree home page, but everything seemed to work properly.

ERROR:-1 DB Error: unknown error
SQL:SELECT * FROM pgv_media WHERE m_gedfile='3' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5 OFFSET 0 [nativecode=ERROR: function rand() does not exist HINT: No function matches the given name and argument types. You may need to add explicit type casts.]

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: numrows() in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpGedView-4.0.2-all/includes/functions_mediadb.php on line 551

Now I'm getting ready to go to the library to see if I can borrow one of their computers and log in to their genealogy database, and I find that I've lost *every* photo loaded into the database. Hopefully this is lost as in "PhpGedView can't find them" not "the photos were accidentally removed from the hard drive." If I have to re-link the photos to the database record, it'll be a pain in the ass, but do-able. If they've been deleted, I should have backups for 99% of the photos around here somewhere, but locating each individual photo and retyping the captions and providence of each photo will be a major undertaking. *sigh*