Got a Newer Phone

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When my ex-husband died in December, prior to that we had talked about the new phone he was planning to buy and that he would give me his old phone. He died before he got to buy his new phone, but I still got his old phone. He had given me the phone I have been using for the past few years. It was a Samsung Galaxy S6. This "new" one was an S9+. I was holding on to it because my phone was slowly dying and I had not yet even contacted Verizon about a sim card, and switching over. So on Tuesday night my phone stopped holding a charge. It also stopped charging all the way to 100%. I was unable to make phone calls or receive them as of Wednesday morning. Texts worked though as did other apps. Today the new sim card arrived and following the directions which said to go to a specific Verizon website to activate my phone. Well the site wasn't Verizon at all but somehow connected. The step-by-step instructions skipped a crucial part. When I put the sim card in, the phone was supposed to open and direct me to use Samsung Smart Switch. But it didn't. And it did not open to allow me to choose my network. I spent almost 2 hours dealing with the chat expert who did not know what they were doing and kept telling me that since what I was doing wasn't working, I should call Verizon. I kept telling the person I could not call anyone because the phone did not work. Real person but very unknowledgeable and just kept repeating steps that would never work until I did the smart switch and chose my network. So I stopped for a couple hours and came back to it by going directly to my Verizon account instead of that website. I got on chat with a very knowledgeable expert who got my phone activated and set up in less than 10 minutes! I should have done that first instead of following the sim card instructions. So why do the people who make the Verizon sim cards direct people to a site that cannot do the job? Why not send them directly to Verizon in the first place? Anyway, today I have a working phone again. I think I am going to have to back up the old phone again though. I did the steps for the backup, but I don't find my files on the new phone. Interestingly enough, there was an SD card in the phone and in spite of the phone being reset to factory defaults, that did not affect the SD card and I got all my ex-husband's photos which was a blessing. There were some of him with the grandkids that I can now have.