I spend a great deal of time looking for things people left behind. Sometimes it is something important, such as a will, a family Bible, or a letter that explains a relationship. Other times it is much smaller: a name written beneath a photograph, a few lines in a newspaper, or a note in the margin of an old document. Those small pieces can become surprisingly valuable because they tell us something the official records did not. Somewhere along the way, that got me thinking about what we are leaving behind ourselves.
We spend a lot of time wishing our ancestors had written more down. We wonder why nobody identified the people in a photograph or explained why a family suddenly moved to another state. We find two relatives who stopped appearing together and wish someone had written down what happened. Sometimes we spend weeks trying to answer a question that somebody in the family once knew well enough to explain in a few sentences. At the time, there was probably no reason to write it down because everyone involved already knew the story.
That may be one of the easiest things to forget about family history. Information usually does not disappear all at once. It disappears a little at a time. One person dies who knew the full story, someone else remembers only part of it, and years later, two names get mixed up, or the reason behind an event is forgotten. Eventually, what was once common family knowledge becomes a research problem for somebody several generations later.
I think photographs show this better than almost anything else. You can hold an old photograph and know that, on the day it was taken, somebody could have named every person in it without hesitation. Nobody thought those names would become a mystery. Decades pass, the people who knew are gone, and suddenly we are studying faces and comparing them with other photographs because nobody wrote six names on the back.
The strange part is that we may be creating the same problem in a different form today. Most of us have far more photographs than our grandparents or great-grandparents ever had. We have email, text messages, videos, recordings, documents, social media accounts, and thousands of digital files. On the surface, it seems as though future generations should know more about us than we could ever know about the people who came before us. I am not sure that is guaranteed.
An old photograph can survive in a drawer for seventy-five years without anybody doing much of anything to it. A digital photograph can disappear because a phone is lost, an account is closed, a hard drive fails, or nobody knows the password. A handwritten letter can sit forgotten in a box and later be discovered by a grandchild. An email may disappear along with an account before anyone realizes there was something worth saving. We are producing an enormous amount of information, but producing information and preserving family history are not quite the same thing.
What interests me most is not the idea of documenting every part of our lives. I would not want that, and I doubt anyone in the future would want to read it all. What I keep coming back to are the ordinary questions we constantly wish we could ask our ancestors.
What was your house like when you were a child?
What did your parents do around the house?
What did everybody eat on Sunday?
How did you meet the person you married?
Who was funny in the family?
Who was difficult?
Why did you choose the work you did?
Which stories did your parents tell you about their parents?
Those are simple questions, but most official records cannot answer them. A census can tell me where someone lived and who was in the household, but it cannot tell me what supper sounded like around the table. A marriage record can give me a date and place, but it usually cannot tell me how two people met or what they thought of each other. A death certificate records the end of a life with great precision while telling us very little about the thousands of ordinary days that came before it.
If you have been researching your family for a while, you have probably run into this yourself. You can sometimes document a person from birth to death and still realize that you know very little about who that person actually was. That is one reason the smallest personal detail can become so important. A letter, recipe, labeled photograph, recorded voice, or short story about an ordinary event can add something that a stack of official documents cannot.
It also makes me think differently about the things I assume my own family will remember. We tend to believe the obvious things will remain obvious. Everyone knows who is standing in that photograph. Everyone knows why we moved. Everyone knows where that nickname came from. But our ancestors probably thought the same way. Family history has taught me that an explanation that seems unnecessary today can become extremely useful fifty or a hundred years from now.
Maybe the answer is not to preserve everything. Maybe it is to preserve enough context. Put names with photographs. Add a date and place when you know them. Write down why an event was important instead of saving only the photograph of it. Record someone telling a family story while that person can still tell it in his or her own words. If there is a story that everybody in your family knows, that may be exactly the story worth writing down because someday everybody may not know it anymore.
I also think we sometimes make preservation harder than it needs to be. The idea of writing an autobiography or organizing thousands of photographs is enough to make most people put off the project. A page about one memory is still useful. Ten minutes of recorded conversation is useful. Identifying twenty photographs is better than waiting until you have enough time to identify two thousand. Family history is filled with small pieces that survived, and there is no reason our own contribution has to begin as some enormous project.
There is another thought behind all of this that I find interesting. When we work on genealogy, it is easy to think of ourselves as standing at the end of the family tree, looking backward. We are not really at the end of anything. We are simply another generation in the middle of a much longer story. The people before us left records that we are trying to understand, and at some point, the records we create will become old records too.
Someday someone may search for us. They will probably be able to find dates, places, marriages, addresses, and other facts. Technology may make some of that easier than it is for us today, but the questions they will really want answered may be the same ones we ask now.
What were these people like?
What did they care about?
How did they spend their ordinary days?
Why did they make the choices they made?
We cannot answer every question for them, and we do not need to. We can simply leave a little more than a name and a date when we have the chance. We spend so much of genealogy looking backward and wishing someone had left one more clue. Every once in a while, it may be useful to turn around and think about the people who will eventually be looking in our direction.
Learn More
FamilySearch Memories
FamilySearch allows you to preserve photographs, documents, written stories, and audio recordings and connect them with people in your family tree.
Library of Congress: Personal Digital Archiving
The Library of Congress provides practical guidance for organizing and preserving personal digital photographs, documents, and other files.
Library of Congress: Caring for Family Photographs
The Library of Congress offers guidance for handling and storing physical photographs so they have a better chance of surviving for future generations.
