Genealogy Blog Party - Preserving My Research



My genealogy shelf is on the left. Protected by giant robots from Cybertron.

For this month's genealogy blog party, Elizabeth O'Neal asks how we as genealogists will preserve our family history research. This topic has been on my mind off and on over the years, as I don't want all the hours and months and years I've spent researching my family's history to be lost. But how do I pass it on in a way that's accessible to someone in the future?

I know for a lot of genealogists, one simple (if not easy) way to pass on the findings is by writing a book. I've thought about doing that since I first got into family history, but a couple things have stopped me:

1. Which lines would I write about? I want to write about all my ancestors, but any book that includes my paternal line would be of little interest to my paternal relatives, and vice versa.

2. A book of any considerable size would likely be put on a shelf and seldom, if ever, remembered. That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do - I want to make sure the stories and details of my ancestors' lives are remembered and passed down.

3. There's also the idea of "I'm not done yet, there's more to discover first." That's not really an excuse though, because genealogy is NEVER done, so waiting until you're at a stopping point is a self-defeating proposition.

So the book idea is on the shelf (pun intended) for now at least. I may do a series of mini-books or something down the road, maybe on Lulu publishing or something where people could just order one or two when they wanted. But I haven't even started anything like that, so that's not really an option yet.

Right now, my main method in preserving my research is this blog. I like it because it's free, it's easily accessible, and I can download a copy of it to my computer whenever I want. But that's only as good as Google, and like any other piece of technology, Google could theoretically go kaput at any time. Seems unlikely today, but remember, Yahoo! was the big dog at one point, and now they're lucky to get a seat at the tech table (from my perspective at least). So this is more of a temporary rather than a permanent solution.

I don't have a lot of paper records in my family history, though I do have a number of old photographs and other artifacts I've collected that I want to ensure stay preserved. My hope is that one of my kids or (eventual) grandkids will catch the bug at some point, and I'll just be able to pass them on to someone I can trust to take care of them. My kids are only 11, 8, and 3 at this point, so any deep scholarly inclinations have yet to manifest themselves. So that idea's on the table, but not super likely to be fulfilled anytime soon.

I have a ton of digital files, as almost my entire genealogy research history is digital. That amounts to somewhere around 50GB of data. That could still fit on a flash drive, so I could just make copies onto flash drives and pass them around to family members. I may do that at some point too, that's not a bad idea.

Overall though, my number one way of preserving my research is my Backblaze account. I went with Backblaze on the recommendation of Lisa Louise Cooke, and it's affordable and easily done (though it takes a good amount of time if you're a monster digital hoarder like me). I just need to ensure that someone or someones in my family has access to it in case anything happens to me.

I guess the long and short of it is, I don't have a full-fledged plan yet, just a couple of halfway thought through ideas of plans, and a couple backup plans. Sounds like I have some work to do.