I've been thinking about this for a while also, Randy, but it's good to prompt people with a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post.
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1. What plans, or potential plans, do you have to pass your genealogy work to relatives and/or descendants, or posterity?
2. Tell us about your plans to pass your work on in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post. Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.
And just because I've been thinking about it doesn't mean I've figured out the answer yet.
Seriously, I have no idea.
So far no one in my family is interested in carrying on the work, that's for sure. Whenever I stop, I'm pretty sure that'll be the end of adding information.
I've been sharing information with family members for literally decades now. Every year for Christmas and Chanukah I used to mail updates to each family member I was in contact with for every family line that person descended from. Some have become interested in specific people — for example, my cousin Yoni has developed a strong focus on our great-great-grandmother; my cousin Jeff was so struck by learning that his grandfather's family name had originally been Gorodetsky that he created that domain, but it doesn't appear that he has kept it — which is nice, but that's pretty much where it ends. The information is out there, though, so it probably won't disappear entirely.
I suspect the best thing I can do for posterity is to create a "family report" style book that is well documented for each of my family lines and give copies of them to the FamilySearch Library. That will help keep the information available to everyone, as I don't expect the LDS church to disappear.
The physical items that I have, particularly photographs, are likely doomed. I don't think anyone else will want to maintain them, especially the ones that are still not identified. "Why would we want to keep these? We don't know who those people are." My father's racing trophies? They'll be gone. Even my family ketubot will have trouble finding someone willing to keep them.
I better stop here. I'm making myself depressed.
I know, it's hard. Just do what you can.
ReplyDeleteKeep on keepin' on, that's what they say.
DeleteDonating a family book to FamilySearch - with rights to digitize it if it isn't already donated that way - will ensure that others can access your work. I agree, FamilySearch isn't likely to disappear.
ReplyDeleteThat's my primary objective at this point: making sure that people have access to the information.
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