The Case for Documenting Yourself: by Jeff Scism - was in Rootsweb Review 1999 [I have taken the liberty of shortening the article] "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. 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 a classical perspective at the end of the 21st century. To put this concept in perspective, think about your family research and the documentation you find about your 19th century ancestors. How does that information impact 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/hstorian. But 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 to shortchange the future. How many of us have an ancestor's actual autobiography written in his or her own hand? How many of us can say we "know" these ancestors? 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. And as we all 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 when it will still be known to be if something tragic happens and by all means, mention it in your will. Remember your working notes tell an important story, your FINISHED sections should be clearly findable and PRINTED OUT! So make sure that the work survives to be passed on to the next generation, who hopefully will continue it." ~~~~~ I know that we all intend to write our own story and save it for the next couple generations but we need to be serious about it. Maybe you can start being serious during this summer. Bette -- The new email address is now: toppline@comcast.net************ *****Hope you will visit my homepage: http://home.comcast.net/~toppline/homepage.htm You can find my ahnentafel chart at http://home.comcast.net/~toppline/antafl.htm