Hi All,
I thought this might be of interest to some. I am in the process of writing "My
Memories" of my family so that future generations will know something about them.
Barb
X-Message: #4
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 20:14:35 -0700
From: Jeff Scism <Scismgenie(a)adelphia.net>
Subject: documenting yourself
This is a letter I wrote to genealogists for teh changing of the
millenium, although four and a half years have past, I think it still
applies.
The Case for Documenting Yourself
From Rootsweb Review, 1999
THE COMING DAY OF GENEALOGY
by Jeff Scism
Knowing where we are from is the first step on the road to where we will
be. The search for personal history and its relationship to our personal
lives makes history come alive. The lesson of genealogy isn't simply a
knowledge of what happened in the past, but also what we know about our
present. Now and in the future the history documented and saved for
future reference will be the known events of our contemporary past. Our
views from the end of the 20th century will be classical perspective at
the end of the 21st century.
To put the concept in perspective, think about your family research and
the documentation you find about your 19th century ancestors. How does
that information impact on the data you are saving about the lives of
the members of your current family? To research the past and store that
information for easy future retrieval will be the legacy of today's
genealogist/historian. A greater legacy will be the way we store
information about ourselves. Making the research of our family's past a
priority now but failing to document our own involvement in current
history is shortchanging the future.
Think about your ancestors of the year 1900, or 1800, or any year in the
past. How many of us can say we "know" these ancestors? How many of us
have "living" documents of these ancestors? Wills, marriage
certificates, and short newspaper notes are a poor "story" of a life
spent. How many diary and journal writers were there in our collective
past? What was our ancestor's view of events of his/her day? Knowing the
regional history of an ancestor, and "milestone" events, can give an
indication of where and why, but to have the story in his or her own
words is a priceless insight into the person's life. Now, how many of us
have an ancestor's actual autobiography written in his or her own hand?
Right now you are a family historian studying the lives of all who came
before you. Are you documenting your own life in a "hard" form for the
genealogists of the future, so that in the year 2100 your
great-great-grandchildren will be able to say they know you? Documenting
your life the way you would want your ancestors to be documented is the
first step to being the person your descendants will know from the past,
and a journal of your thoughts on current events will be a marker and a
reference valuable to many, not just your descendants.
--
What I would like to add after retrospect is that fewer people are
writing ON paper. As many of us know, the electronic documents we work
with everyday can vanish in an instant, and be forever lost.
BACK UP your data, all of it onto a CD, (or multiple copies) and store
it away from your computer, your Home, and in a safe place where it will
still be known to be if something tragic happens, and by all means
mention it in your will.
I know you would hate to see your life's work callusly deleted, after
your death because whoever inherits your computer has no genealogical
interest, or willingness to preserve what is in there.
Remember your working notes tell an important story, your FINISHED
sections should be clearly findable and PRINTED OUT.
WORST CASE: if your computer takes a dump, you can always scan documents
and hopefully OCR the text back into a computer editable form.
Hook your safety belts, and take the ride, but make sure that the work
survives to be passed on to the next one who will continue it.
~~
Jeffery G. Scism. IBSSG
Genealogy is the art convincing public officials that you need to have
a document to determine IF you are a descendant, and if you had Proof
of descendancy, you wouldn't NEED the document.