Preserving Family History
Oh gosh. This is a big question. I’m glad to say that I’ve already started preserving my family history, and I wasn’t the first one. My dad’s first cousin Rick started doing family history research before the era of the Internet, and his mom, who lives a few hours from my immediate family, still has a lot of his research. She’s nearly 90 years old though, and due to dementia, I highly doubt she knows where any of it is – she was supposed to find it for me several years ago and I haven’t heard from her about it since.
For my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday, my parents got me some software that included a year long subscription to Ancestry.com and some offline tools for creating a family tree. I definitely utilized it, and I now have a solid family tree going back several hundred years. I still wish I could do more with it, like researching more deeply into the backgrounds of my grandparents and other relatives, but we had to cancel our subscription when the fees got too high. Quite a bummer.
The other big family history project that I’ve worked on is a large family photo album, comprised mostly of photos that my grandfather shot of my dad and his brothers, as well as his brother’s kids, 50+ years ago. My dad and grandfather are and were, respectively, both very talented photographers, and we literally have boxes full of photos from my dad’s childhood. It’s interesting to consider this because I hardly have any printed photos of me as a child. That’s not to say I don’t have many photos, I do, but they’re all stored on computers, SD cards, flash drives, etc.
Anyway, the photos from my dad’s childhood turned into a big project for me for a while. I scanned each and every one of them onto my computer, saved them as individual jpegs, and then put them into a home-made album. I really enjoyed choosing which photos would go together on which pages, but more interesting as asking questions and learning about my dad’s, uncles’, and cousins’ childhoods. Looking at the pictures, I saw that two of his cousins as children looked exactly as their current kids did at the same ages. I even sent pictures to them and we got a good laugh out of it.
I guess storing the photos physically (for the most part) has its downfalls. There could be a house fire, a flood, the dog could destroy them, but as is becoming abundantly clear throughout this course, there are equally as many, if not more, ways that a document can be destroyed, lost, or rendered otherwise unreadable if its stored digitally. I think having documentation in both formats is probably best in order for preservation, which is why I scanned them before putting them into the album. But for the most part I really enjoy sitting down and flipping the pages of an old fashioned family album, and I really don’t think I would want to put it all online and lose out on that experience.
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