Editor’s Note
Each of us contributes to our own family and to the world in a unique way. Whether we are rich or poor, famous or unnoticed in history, every family member makes a difference in the life of others. We learn important lessons from lives that were less than exemplary, and we are inspired by lives that were lived to help others. Our family members are the stuff that legends and memories are made of. So is it smart or is it dangerous to increasingly rely on changing technology to save these stories?
I don’t think anyone is too old to enjoy the vast variety of electronic “toys” on the market today. We love the speed and the ease that technology brings us. In recent years, we’ve learned that it’s a whole lot less labor-intensive and more economical to move from publishing family histo ries in book form to computerizing them in some format or another.
In a relatively short time, we radically changed the way we record personal and global history. But sometimes technology hands us mixed blessings. The floppy disks on which we first recorded our family histories are hard, if not impossible, to read now. I still have the handwritten notes from a 1972 interview with my aunt, but the cassette tape made the same day is now brittle and barely audible. When VCRs became popular, we moved away from making home movies. We knew that our old home movies were decomposing and we thought we’d preserve them better by moving all of our 8mm movies to video. Then we learned that the magnetic properties of tape make these videos even less stable than the original 8mm format.We’ve learned that it’s quick and easy to scan and store old family photos and images of important documents on our hard drives, online, or on CDs or DVDs. The trend to take digital pictures is quickly replacing traditional film and paper-based photographs. Yet how long will we be able to access these treasures? There’s strong evidence that the century-old tintypes I have of my grandparents will outlive the CD copy that was made of them just a couple of years ago.It happens to us all. Shortly after we start to depend on a new and “improved” version of technology, we also learn of its perils.
Because these issues are of great concern to me and to everyone else I know, I chose “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow?: Technology’s Role in Global Record Keeping” as my lecture topic for the 2005 National Genealogical Society Conference. Anyone who knows me understands that I’m not qualified to answer the important question posed in that title. It is my great privilege, however, to know some real authorities in this field. I spoke with archivists, librarians, and technology industry leaders (twenty-five in all) to ask their opinions. Since there is too much information to share in a short forty-five minute conference session, Ancestry Contributing Editor Matt Wright and I have also collaborated to share more of these fascinating stories and promising technology solutions in this issue of Ancestry Magazine.
A hundred years from now, someone’s going to want to know about you and your family: who you were, where you lived, what was going on in your world, what you liked, what you looked like, and what you stood for. We are all unique people with stories to be recorded—stories that will teach and help future generations. But it’s up to us to harness the power of today’s technology so that each of us can serve as the unbroken link that connects our past with tomorrow.
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