Someone asked me a hard question once, and I think a lot of people have asked it in their own minds, even if they never say it out loud.
They said, “Is genealogy really worth doing? After you die, hardly anybody will remember you anyway. Your friends will be gone. Their friends will be gone. Your family might not even care. You can give your research to your kids, but what if they don’t keep it? What if you donate it to a museum and they discard it, or the building burns down? Is this just a hobby to keep you busy, or is it a waste of time?”
That question hits two fears at once. The first is that we will be forgotten. The second is that our work will disappear. Both fears are real because time does erase things. Papers get lost. Hard drives fail. Families scatter. Institutions change. Sometimes, the people who come after us do not value what we valued.
So, is genealogy worth it?
Yes, and not because genealogy guarantees a legacy. It doesn’t. Nothing does. Almost everything that humans build, write, photograph, record, or save can be lost. The value is not in a promise that it will last forever. The value is in what it does now, and in what it makes possible later, even if later looks different from what we hoped.
Genealogy is valuable because it gives the living something tangible. It provides clarity on the questions families have. It turns stories into documented facts. It replaces vague assumptions with names, dates, places, and proof. It helps people understand why a family moved, why a name changed, why a marriage ended, why a child was raised by grandparents, why a line disappeared from the records, or why one branch ended up a thousand miles away.
Sometimes genealogy repairs confusion. Sometimes it corrects wrong information that has been repeated for generations. Sometimes it gives someone their first real connection to a grandparent they never met. Sometimes it restores a person to the family story who was treated as if they didn’t exist.
Even if nobody reads your finished binder one hundred years from now, those outcomes still count.
Genealogy is also worth it because it changes the researcher. If you have been doing this for any length of time, you know it teaches patience. It teaches careful thinking. It teaches humility because records do not always cooperate or tell the truth neatly. It teaches you how to weigh evidence, how to admit what you do not know yet, and how to keep going anyway. That is not wasted time. That is the kind of work that forms a person.
But there is another part to this question: preservation.
What if it gets thrown away?
That can happen. But it is also where we can be practical.
The goal is not to produce one fragile copy and hope it survives. The goal is to make your work easy to keep, easy to share, and hard to destroy completely. That means more than one format. More than one copy. More than one location. It means a simple system that a non-genealogist can understand.
A printed book is great, but it is only one layer. A digital copy is great, but it is only one layer. A tree on one website is not enough. A thumb drive in one drawer is not enough. The best approach is redundancy.
You give a printed copy to one person. You give a digital copy to another person. You keep a copy for yourself. You store one off-site. You keep your photos labeled. You include a short “how to use this” page for whoever inherits it. You do not make it complicated. You make it obvious.
And if you want to donate, you do it thoughtfully. You pick a place that matches your material. A local historical society, a county library, a state archive, a denominational archive, a university special collection, or a regional genealogy society may be a better match than a generic museum. Some repositories will take a collection and catalog it. Some will not. You can ask about their policies. You can leave a clear inventory. You can increase the likelihood that the collection will survive by making it easier to manage.
Still, even with best practices, nothing is guaranteed.
So the real question becomes this. If your name is not remembered, does your work still have value?
It does, because genealogy is not only about being remembered. It is about remembering others. It is about refusing to let people vanish without a trace when there is something you can recover. It is an act of care aimed both backward and forward.
And even if your family does not keep it the way you hope, your work may still outlive your expectations in smaller ways. A single photo caption. A documented maiden name. A corrected burial place. A set of sources that show where the truth came from. A written story that preserves a voice. Those pieces can travel farther than you think, because they can be copied, shared, and used in other people’s research.
A future researcher may not know you personally. They may not even know your face. But they might quietly thank you when your notes save them months of frustration.
That is the payoff most people never see. You do careful work. You tell the truth as best you can. You label what you found and how you found it. You leave the next person a clear path.
Even if your name fades, the people you preserved do not have to.
That’s why it’s worth it.
