Intentional Preservation
Last week we talked about choosing one story to send into the future. Some knew right away which one they preserve for their future descendants. Others couldn’t choose— a Sophie’s Choice situation. The good news is that you don’t have to choose just one. Now think about why you tell the stories. What is your intention behind writing them? Who do you want to read them? Who do you want to find them?
My question to you this week is:
The stories you write about your family history—
Who do you want to find them?
Be part of the conversation. Let us know in the comments. Your stories matter.
The reality of the fate of the stories we hold tenuously in our lifetimes is that without intentionally preserving them they will likely be left behind. There will be folks much like us who yearn for even an inkling of what an ancestor was like, what they believed in, and the moments that defined them. Unfortunately, these family history researchers will never see our stories. That is, unless we are intentional about their fate.
Posting these stories on Substack or any other platform for blogging is an excellent start. It’s important. The stories are told. They’re written down. But it won’t be enough to transport these stories into the year 2050, 2100, or 2126.
These outstanding stories that I get the pleasure of curating for GenStack each week, stories that go so far beyond the names and dates as to reveal who the individuals were, are likely not to make it that far into the future. The articles may spend many years there, but future descendants and researchers living well after we are around to carry them will likely have disappeared by then.
Think about the way people communicated in 1926, 100 years ago. While 1926, in genealogy years is a minute ago, do we have access to the main source of communication back then? People wrote letters. How many people have found letters their 2-times great grandparent wrote? Of your sixteen 2-times great grandparents, how many of them have letters left behind that you were able to find?
Yes, there are exceptions. I have read articles written that were based on the letters left behind. But these are few.
How many letters were thrown away by someone trying to be efficient after the funeral? How many letters are no longer findable because someone among the many descendants has those letters, but the rest of the descendants have no knowledge of them?
What if they had been intentionally preserved? What if there was a place they could have deposited them that would have made them findable by this generation? Wouldn’t that be a dream?
We cannot, of course, live in “What if.” But what we can do is change what happens to our articles. We cannot count on Substack being a thing in the year 2126. What we can do is choose a vessel for transporting them that is designed for the long game.
Our posted articles tell the stories. Being intentional about preserving them takes an additional step. It’s a simple step, but if missed, they will likely disappear.
This week, I published Ancestral Women: Collected Stories of Women in Family History by Their Descendants, a book that holds the stories of 13 women told by their descendants. These stories now live in a more permanent space, in the Internet Archive.
In Stewardship Matters: The Storyteller’s Guide to Preserving Family History, I write about this as the natural next step in our work. I don’t think this has to be complicated, but I do think it’s worth talking about together.
This is exactly the kind of conversation the Coterie exists for. We talk about our stories and how we want to preserve them in our Coterie Collabs. Join us for our next one on May 22. https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/8qn6nOW2RzaGGG0PcwC7aw
Stewardship Matters: The Storyteller’s Guide to Preserving Family History is coming soon. If you’d like an advance ebook copy, join the Coterie as a paid subscriber/member — then join us in the upcoming Storyteller Project (coming soon) when we walk through the steps of publishing your stories and making them findable for the long-game.
I’m taking my ancestor letters and writing a cover story about them that places that ancestor in the time period in which the letter(s) were written. I’m doing this both to preserve their letters and to introduce descendants to their ancestors. I’ve learned so much through this process. I’d like to learn more about the *internet archive*.
I've given a great deal of thought to the ultimate location of my family history research. To that end, I try to share my stories with any family members who might be interested in what I've found. Further, I have plans made to send major portions of my work to the Internet Archive. As some of my stories are approaching book-length, I will publish more of them and offer them to libraries in geographic areas referenced in the books.
I'm trying to interest younger family members in continuing the work I've begun. I can't claim that any of them are interested enough to be willing to take possession of my archive, yet. But hope springs eternal.