Keeping it safe, keeping it useable
 

I attended a zoom meeting last night on using Evernote as a filing tool. He advised us to put everything online as it was safer there. This, as Facebook crashed.

Meanwhile, I am helping to sort a deceased friend's archive: notes and record cards, both handwritten, and piles of newspaper cuttings.

My own winter project is to go through a very large box of papers: to throw the paper printouts of census returns and scraps of handwritten trees and file the useful stuff.

The Evernote solution would have been ideal forty years ago, but I'd be dead by the time I'd scanned and tagged every last item: every new brilliant suggestion of methods of organisation has left me in a worse muddle than before.

However, my friend's lifetime work may well end in a skip as none of us can read the handwriting!

I have great difficulty in reading original documents and do wonder what will happen to all my work when I'm gone - will any of the family be interested or bother to keep it.

Giving them a copy of the family tree doesn't give them more than names and dates and no background information or stories.

I have online trees but do like to keep paper copies - ancestry wouldn't let me in yesterday and I wondered what would happen if the information was wiped as was feared with facebook yesterday.

OH likes to hear about my results with his line but doesn't get involved. Even my sil, niece and nephew aren't interested in my brother's ancestry and I'll be getting all the family photo's soon.

Will all my years of research go to waste