The Joy of Genealogy?

These days people are saying that you could usefully spend your time in self-isolation or physical distancing by organizing your genealogy files and scanning paper files into a computer compatible format. That’s so that you can pass along comprehensive well ordered information on your family history to your sons, daughters, grandchildren and their descendants on down the line.

They might not want it?  Read on while I explain why that attitude makes sense.

There's nothing wrong with working on your family history. Organized files, colour coded, neatly arranged, certainly look satisfying on the shelf or in filing cabinets. Scanning things into computer files means you can dump all the physical research notes and non-archival materials. If that keeps you out of trouble and brings you joy so much the better, but don’t expect undying appreciation from subsequent generations. Why?

Look at it this way. What would be the consequences if each of your 2,048 10th great-grandparents had each prepared the type of collection you are working on now and passed it on through the generations to you? Let’s say they’d pared it down to 2,000 sheets of paper, the product of their in-depth research into all their previous generations. A typical banker’s box, 15" width x 12" depth x 10" height holds 2,000 sheets. So you'd been dealing with 2,048 boxes. Each is a bit over 1 cubic foot; you’re now dealing with 2,180 cubic feet of boxes -- more than will be held by all but the largest self-storage unit. The storage cost might be $250 per month. A typical box weighs 30 pounds, that’s 61,440 pounds for the collection — or 27 imperial tons (that's 31 US tons).

On top of that add biographical materials from each person in subsequent generations in your direct line, another 2,046 ancestors. I won’t do the calculation, the point is already made.

Even if your descendants could afford the storage would they likely want to dig through those tons of information?

Scanned into pdfs the material might be 4TB. That's a very rough estimate, it very much depends on the content, less if all text, more for high-quality images. That’s not unreasonable in these days of institutional petabyte storage, but would the descendants want to look through it all if not searchable?

If you wouldn’t want to take on the challenge of caring for those ancestral materials should you add to the burden of subsequent generations?

Yes, enjoy the challenge of the search. Recognize it’s for your own enjoyment. Just as with crossword puzzles, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying them — just don’t bequeath the completed ones to your descendants!

You may have already scoffed at the scenario painted above as it would require your parents to have duplicated each of the boxes they inherited as a gift to their children, as many copies as they had children. As your n-times great grandparents are in all probability shared with many many many descendants there would be a lot of duplicates being stored. The answer is sharing.

If you like the security of physical copies, no danger of an electromagnetic pulse frying computer storage, produce a book and place copies in a few libraries that accept genealogical materials. The cost will mean you’re careful to be selective. Or write articles for magazines or journals. Family history societies are always looking for content that they publish without charge to members, and you’ll have the advantage of editorial review. As many copies are produced there’s a good chance some will survive many years — there’s a term for that — LOCKSS — lots of copies keep stuff safe. The contents may well be kept by the PERiodical Source Index (PERSI) operated by the Allen County Public Library and available through Findmypast.

Online there are many options. You can produce your own family tree on most of the commercial genealogy sites specifying the level of privacy with which you feel comfortable. Just remember that complete privacy means the content will never be shared.

Consider the unified databases, an example is WikiTree: The Free Family Tree. LOCKSS applies so plan on adding information to more than one such site.

Enjoy the time you put in researching and documenting your family history; then think about how best you can help rather than impose a burden on the generations that follow.