Easy come, easy go...

Without technology, it would have taken years instead of months to put together a 3700 person database, complete with sources.

And technology also enabled me to wipe out most of that database's sources with just a click or two. When I noticed that my tree was missing from ancestry.com, I tried to replace it with the gedcom I'd downloaded from them only minutes earlier. It didn't work. Their system didn't recognize it as a gedcom.

Surprisingly, PAF, a free, outdated family history program, read ancestry's unrecognizable gedcom, but just the bare bones information remains. I still have names and family relationships for the people who was born before 1930, and their vital dates, marriages, census years and locations. The rest is basically gone. I feel too disheartened to start the sourcing process over again for anyone not in Henry White's direct line.

What's left of my oddly formatted and severely edited file will be posted at rootsweb, in hopes that the effort spent on it wasn't completely in vain: {Henry White} Pages. Ancestry's gedcom (or PAF's interpretation of it) doesn't export marriage information well; multiple spouses are often listed in the wrong order chronologically. But, they are listed! PAF saved them from complete annihilation. 

So glad I didn't delete PAF somehow, too!