If you don’t share it, you lose it! – Part One
Note: This article was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site.
I am writing about losing all the genealogical work you have done during your lifetime. Literally, if you do not share your work with others, particularly those in your family, you will lose it all when you die. I may have written about this before, but it bears repeating. A few years ago, I was invited to a neighbor’s house. We were fairly new in the area, and I did not really know much about the person who invited me over. She told me that her mother had done extensive genealogical work during her lifetime and had, at the time, recently died. She invited me over because she wanted to know what to do with all that genealogy stuff. When I visited her home, she showed me a rather large room that had shelves from floor to ceiling. In addition, there were several large file cabinets in the middle of the room, The shelves were filled with 3-right binders full of genealogical information and documents as were the filing cabinets. The amount of information in that one room probably came somewhat close to the pile of documents and records I have in my basement. I offered to come and go through all the binders, books, and files and tell her what was worth preserving and what could be thrown away. She thanked me and I left. I reaffirmed my offer several times as I saw her over the next few weeks.
Sometime much later, she mentioned she had moved all the stuff to boxes and that was the last I have heard of the huge amount of work done by this now deceased genealogist. There were several things wrong about this scenario. The deceased genealogist had apparently failed to let anyone in her family or otherwise about the need to preserve some or all of the work she had done. Because I did not have access to those particular records, I have no way of knowing whether or not some or all of the information about the genealogist’s family has been preserved online. I don’t remember seeing a computer in the room, but there may have been one.
With such a huge body of work, the idea of preserving it all can be overwhelming. I have spent a huge amount of time digitizing nearly all the records in the many boxes down in my basement but now I have the larger task of identifying and preserving the digital images. Some of the images are really bad and should be re-scanned, but like everyone in the world, I am on the ultimate conveyor belt and probably do not have enough time left to work through the entire collection. I do have a constant program of moving the images to the FamilySearch.org Memories section of the website. But that is a one-by-one process. The files that I have presently are about 7 TB of storage space.
Many of my scanned images and the original negatives and photos are preserved in the Overson Family Photograph Collection at the University of Arizona. Here is a screenshot of the collection webpage.
Another large collection that I digitized is at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is the collection of the Mary Ann Linton Morgan documents.
Not all of your documents fall into the category of records that need to be preserved. During this series, I hope to discuss the ways that your genealogical information, documents, and photos can best be preserved. I must forewarn you, however, that I will recommend uploading your information to the FamilySearch.org website. But I will also explore other avenues for preservation such as the Special Collections libraries spread across the world.
