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0 pointsilamont4y ago0 comments

I am heavily involved in genealogy, practitioners of which have a huge interest in maintaining data, documents, photos, and other research for the next generations.

I have a copy of a handwritten family tree and other notes written by great-grandmothers, cousins, and great aunts, some of which survived close to 100 years. If they had computers back then, I doubt any of the data would be available now. The photo books I have shared with relatives contains copies of these letters and charts and family photos, and even if half of them are destroyed or lost in the next 50 years, the remainder will survive, hopefully for much longer.

It amazes me how much faith other genealogists have in cloud storage or paid services like Ancestry, owned for the past 10+ years by a series of profit-focused private equity firms. Policies change (for PE's benefit), subscriptions lapse, people delete accounts, or online services get shut down, as some Ancestry users discovered the hard way:

https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/myfamily-shuttered-ance...

Another problem with these services: Even though I can share a link to an online tree or a shared cloud folder, more than half of the recipients hate to deal with them because they are forced to learn a new UI or get prompted to death to sign up for a paid service they don't need. The other half eventually forget the links or the information that was in them. Paper or books is the only proven long-term storage medium for genealogy data.

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boringg4y ago

What do you do to preserve your accounts? I share your concern about the services available today and don't subscribe to them. That said - my question for you, as you are heavily involve: what do you do and is it effective / costly / built for what time period?

Thanks!

ilamontOP4y ago

I use a desktop software program to organize and save data (Reunion for Mac) and export a backup GEDCOM from time to time which can be imported into other applications if need be:

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/GEDCOM

GEDCOM has many drawbacks, but it's the de facto standard, it's been around for nearly 40 years, and it's plaintext.

Core data and pictures and family stories gets put into photo books and widely shared with relatives, including some cousins I barely know. I've done three so far for different branches, and will do some updated ones as well as new research is completed.

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