Dear Folks! I received this on another list and realized it is still SO TRUE even though it is from five years ago. The last paragraphs have reminded me that I'm not doing very well in this area at this time. Hope it is relevant for you too! Now let us do something about it especially in the area of backup! :) Later.Nancy Nancy Cluff Siders TSFA President and List Admin for: CLUFF-L, COUNTRYMAN-L, LETSON-L, MCKAY-ELKENNY-L, SACKETT-L, SIDERS-L To forget one's ancestor is to be a brook without a source, A tree without a root. ~Chinese proverb =================================================== Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 20:14:35 -0700 From: Jeff Scism <Scismgenie@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 callously 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.