My mother sent along a link to a new Holocaust archive that opened to the public consisting of scanned documents and general information. Name, town, prisoner number, concentration camp. I dove into it, trying to find my great-grandmother’s brothers.

And I think I found them, many alternative spellings later; two men who fit in terms of name, town, and camp. I knew they were in Buchenwald and the town they’re from. There is a birth year listed on one of the documents, so I asked family members if they could name my great-grandmother’s siblings birth order. Was one of her brothers 9 years older? If yes, I found them. If not, this was someone else with the same name.

But no one knew.

And all the people who would have known are gone.

It made me so incredibly sad. I’m seeing a lot of family members this upcoming weekend, so I was going to carry around a list of names of her siblings and see if we could put them in order by pooling everyone’s information. Maybe no one can put them in order on their own, but perhaps they could at least say person A is older than person B, and in doing so, the order will logically present itself. At least, that is my hope. Plus I have a few papers to go through that have family stories written on them, and maybe there are clues to the birth order in those papers.

I guess it just brings up how sad I am that I don’t have my grandmother anymore, so I can’t ask her these questions. She would’ve known where her mother stood in relation to her siblings.

I actually knew they were in Buchenwald because Elie Weisel was in Buchenwald, and they were from the same town. It always gave me comfort that I knew some of their story by reading his story. They are one of the various townspeople crowded together with Weisel in the ghetto and the train and the camp. And so I knew they also ended up at Buchenwald, though unlike Weisel, they did not get out.

This is my first time diving into Holocaust records. And, on one hand, it’s upsetting, but it’s also all I have left except for a photo and a few stories. These documents confirm these people existed. They were my great-great uncles, and they had wives and children and lives in Europe. And they should be remembered, their documents collected, like everyone else on the family tree.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a day to remember people in the military who have died in service to the US. It should be a somber holiday considering that it is marking countless deaths, but it’s billed as the “official start of summer” and plenty of stores host Memorial Day sales.

It made me think about how I would feel if October 15th––Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day––became an excuse for cookouts and pool parties. I would feel really upset to see a day designated to mark something emotional and sacred being used to sell cars or mattresses.

Sending thoughts to everyone who is mourning a loss today. Thank you to everyone who serves in our military and the families who support them.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I finally updated my phone from iOS9. I was still able to use 32-bit games because I decided not to update my software last year so I could continue to play those games that didn’t update to 64-bit.

And then one by one, the rest of my apps stopped working. The first to go was Starbucks. It wouldn’t work with anything under iOS10. Fine. I wouldn’t drink coffee. Then LinkedIn went. Fine. I didn’t need to see shared articles. Twitter went and I couldn’t download new apps that I wanted to try because they wouldn’t work with my phone. But I still didn’t update it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back? MailChimp. When MailChimp stopped working last week, I took a deep breath and said goodbye to my games. I could live without coffee. I could live without cool meditation apps. But I couldn’t live without the ability to check MailChimp from bed or on the go.

I really dislike the new operating system, but MailChimp is functioning once again. And I miss those old games. Damn those developers for not updating them to 64-bit. I’m looking at you, Activision. You’ve lost my app-purchasing trust.

I am so excited for the Downton Abbey movie. We’re currently only in season five, but we’re furiously working our way through the remaining episodes so we’ll be ready to go to the theater on September 20th when it opens.

We came to Downton Abbey late in the game–we often wait until shows have ended before we begin watching them–but we are so in love with the family and staff. ChickieNob and I are awful about reading spoilers before episodes, so we mostly know everything that will happen in the series. I will be very sad when we finish the last episode, though we’ve already planned to try Victoria again. We couldn’t get into it when we tried the first episode because we associated Jenna Coleman with Doctor Who. But maybe enough time has passed that we’ll be able to see her in something else.

Who else is excited for the Downton Abbey movie?

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Measure of Love is still on sale for a few more days for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled writes about the series finale of The Big Bang Theory, where a child-free-by-choice character is suddenly happily pregnant. I don’t know much about the show, but this would have made me cringe, too: “Perhaps this abrupt shift in character development wouldn’t have been quite so eyebrow-raising/infuriating if Penny wasn’t the show’s SECOND child-free-by-choice female character to wind up pregnant.” Loribeth makes me want to stand up and cheer with her final paragraph. Click over and cheer, too.

It’s Inconceivable asks how people answer when they get asked whether they have children. She explains, “Obviously, I have no (living) children, but it doesn’t mean I want to necessarily explain my whole childless existence to someone casually inquiring, or being more probing, or fishing for information.” She explains how she decides how to address it. Great post for anyone grappling with how much to reveal.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post wishing that one person had “acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.” In other words, we express condolences over a death, but we rarely express condolences or see infertility as a loss, too. She breaks down the hierarchy of loss, pointing out, “people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost.” It’s an excerpt from her book, Life Without Baby, so you can get a taste for what you’ll find in the pages.

The roundup to the Roundup: So excited for Downton Abbey. Measure of Love is still on sale. Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 17th and 24th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I found out about a book — Words on the Threshold — which led me to an old Atlantic article about last words. A daughter started writing down all the things her father was saying at the end of his life, and the experience led her to look at “the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.” What do people say when they don’t have a lot of time left to speak? Who asks questions, who makes requests, who uses many words, and who uses few.

Or this thought:

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

It’s not as if anyone guides the dying towards their last words in the same way we guide babies to speak their first words. And it’s also not about the literal final word; it’s the final words, the last thoughts conveyed, sometimes over days. What are the most important points to get across when you have limited time?

I don’t have answers. I thought about it while reading the article; what would I say — beyond I love you to the people I love — if I only had a few hours left. And I couldn’t come up with anything. Though that’s the point: that it’s not like the movies where someone summons their most profound thoughts right before their dying breath. It’s not something we can imagine until we’re in the moment.

It makes my throat feel tight to think about it.