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Good afternoon and welcome. Welcome to How Not to Leave Your Genealogy Behind. My name is Curt Witcher. And I manage the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a fine institution of many resources, many of them available online. And it so happens that Fort Wayne, Indiana, is hosting this year's FGS Conference, Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference, in August, just in case you're in the neighborhood. And I'm Amy Johnson Crow. I am a genealogy educator, blogger, and writer. And with Curt's experience at the library and my experience with libraries, genealogy societies, and my blog readers, we've noticed that there are a lot of people--I think ourselves included--that we do our genealogy, and we feel this need for it to last. We've made all these wonderful discoveries. So how do we get those discoveries, how do we get that research, how do we get those ancestors to live beyond us?

So we kind of know about you, as Amy indicated, because we kind of know about us. And with Amy's experience, I would add to mine--not a bad thing; this is a judgment-free zone--but after almost four decades at the Allen County Public Library, being rained on with all kinds of donations all hours of the day that we're open and all times of the year, I have some sobering news to report. We're not doing a very good job collectively making sure that our genealogy goes forward. So I just want to show you a few things that is kind of evidence that we aren't doing that great of a job. So this particular item, a designer duffel bag--this is how someone's personal collection came to us. And actually, it was brought to us by a grandchild. Notice in that duffel bag there's a framed picture. There's a plastic bag filled with stuff from local pharmacy and all manner of other things. Most other libraries in the country would have taken this right out into where? Garbage. The recycling bin, absolutely. This is not how to ensure that our information moves forward, is preserved. A much better collection--but we received a collection of stapled and paper-clipped letters, handwritten letters. From the date you can see it's World War II era. Awesome, except that's all we received. Who are these people? "Dear Fred," "Dear Eleanora," "All my love always, Fred" doesn't tell us a whole lot about these wonderful letters that evidence some people's lives. Yes, that is a leaf and refuse recycle bag on the left. And we're looking inside the bag on the right. We'll leave the denomination unidentified. But within the last two years, we received this collection of, yes, church records that the congregation no longer wanted because they weren't official records. So we got them in a leaf and refuse bag. And stapled to the top of that bag, you can see in the right-hand portion of that slide, is all the data that came with it, a little stapled note kind of saying, "Not official record, not interested, don't want anymore." And then we receive all kinds of donations like this that tells me we're not really placing a high value on making sure that our records are preserved and brought forward. So all of that says maybe we should share some ideas, suggestions, maybe even dance a little bit in best practices for ensuring that the stories that we've collected in our lives are there for our children's children, our grandchildren's grandchildren, who we will never meet and will never have an opportunity to meet us. "Stuff" gatherers versus researchers--again, this is not a judgment zone--judgement-free free zone. But let's just ask ourselves and be really honest with ourselves. We don't have to report out to anybody. Are we really researchers? And we should have maybe made that a small r, because this isn't about how you're doing your research. It's, are you collecting information with intention, the intention of creating and crafting a story and ensuring that that story can be told over and over and over again long after you're gone? Or are we just stuff gatherers? And that's fine. I would just suggest to you that if we're stuff gatherers, we really don't need to worry about pushing our material forward into the future, because there will always be stuff. Apparently, it doesn't matter what kind of stuff, what kind of condition, from the slides that we just shared with you--so a question for you to ponder the rest of the hour, the rest of the day, and maybe as you try to kind of up your game research wise or stuff gatherer wise.

So as different people are trying to figure out how to make their either research or their stuff last, there are a couple of solutions--and I use the term solutions very loosely--that Curt and I have heard over and over again. And the first one I refer to as mythical solution number one: No worries, it will last. My family knows how important this is to me. They'll make sure that it lasts. Well, I think that with mythical solution number one, it's kind of like you're sitting there having a picnic in the park. And it's very idyllic. And the birds are chirping and the sun is shining. And oh, no worries. It'll be wonderful. It'll be magical. I also refer to this solution as the ostrich method because you are thoroughly putting your head in the sand and just pretending that it isn't a problem, that it isn't an issue. Well, you might not see it as a problem, but it's still there. Just because the head is buried in the sand, doesn't make the problem go away. And just because it's important to you, doesn't translate into your family realizing that it is valuable and needs to be saved. Because what it turns out that, yes, it's important to you. Yes, you're going to save it.

But people only save what they care about.

So just because it's wonderfully important to you, that doesn't translate into your family saying, "Oh well, that was important to her. We need to save this because it was important to her."

That's not the way our minds work. We save what we care about. And let's be really clear, Amy, about this slide. What Amy has said here is that people will only save what they care about, not what you care about. And sometimes we don't make that connection. What Amy just articulated--"It's important to me, therefore it is to everybody"--no, no. So as we're working and doing our family history, and we know there's some family members who really don't care about what we do, about our stories, about research. If we want to be successful in having family members responsible for moving this forward, they need to care. They need to care about it. And you know, we've all heard the kind of funny stories about, oh, you know, somebody had a collection of a thousand rookie baseball cards. And it was in a box. And Mom threw it out, never minding that those baseball cards would have been worth thousands of dollars, right? Well, why didn't she know that they were valuable? Well, she didn't know. But somehow, even though we've heard those stories about the baseball cards getting tossed out, we don't translate that into our family history, because for us it's so important we just assume that everybody else realizes their importance. Well, I was on Twitter not too long ago and having this discussion--and sharing this with Bobby J's permission. She said, "My aunt threw out photos and a family tree my grandfather had in an old suitcase he brought from Russia. The tree had over 300 names on it. She felt it was junk."

The aunt didn't care about it. So the aunt didn't save it. And if you think, "Well, you know what? I'm pretty good at guilting my kids. You know, guilt can be a good motivator." I will haunt you from the grave. Yeah, I think I've actually used that line. So we think that guilt is going to work. Well honestly, guilt is only going to go so far--right?--because what happens is, yeah, I have guilted you into saving this. But you don't really care about it. You're only keeping it out of a sense of guilt, out of a sense of obligation. So what do you do with it? Because you have to keep it. Because you don't want to be haunted from the grave. So what do you do with it? You're not going to do anything with it. But you're going to keep it safe. And it's going to be up in the closet or down in the basement or up in the attic. But you're not going to do anything with it. So you're not going to be telling anybody else how important that is. And if they don't realize how important it is, there's no way they can care about it--you see where I'm going with this?--because you've inherited it, and you put it up there in the closet. Then the next generation comes along. They open up the closet, or they go up in the attic, or they go down in the basement, and they discover this box of stuff. And they're like, "I don't know. I have no idea what these random papers are. They make no sense to me." And then they put them in the recycle bin. So guilt is only going to carry you so far. Guilt is only worth about one generation at best. At best. So moving into an arena that I'm very familiar with--and again, judgment-free zone if you've ever done this--but mythical solution number two is Leave it to the library society--they can handle it. Oh my goodness, we won't, but we could talk for the rest of the hour about--no. They can't handle it. There are precious few libraries like the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, in this wonderful town, or the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne or Dallas Public or Houston. There's maybe a couple of dozen in the country that really are open to taking most everything, no matter how unorganized it might be. And that number is shrinking because of space considerations. So leaving it to a library society, just sort of making yourself feel good that, yes, this will be available one hundred years from now because I gave it to XYZ library in Bucksnort, Mississippi, or Missouri--no, not going to happen. So if we're really intentional, if we're really interested in leaving our material, let's look at some specifics. You, me, as people who would like to see this move forward, if we want to say family isn't an option for me--I need to get this to a society, an association, a library, an archive--we need to begin musing about this question: Where does your genealogy belong? Where does my genealogy belong? What do I mean by that? We have to pay a little bit of attention to, what do particular types of libraries collect? We know, or we should know--you will know now because I'm telling you--every public library in the country focuses on its geographic service area. So if it's a town public library, one of their missions, amongst all other missions, is to collect and preserve and present the local history of that town. If it's a county library, it's for the county. If it's a regional library, it's for the region. So if we have family from a particular county, Lee County, Kentucky, and we think there's a lot of good information in what we have collected over the years, we need to engage that Lee County public library or Paducah if it's McCracken County, Kentucky. And we need to say, "This is the kind of information I have about prominent and everyday families in McCracken County, Kentucky. What are your acquisitions policies? What are your donation policies? How do I get my materials to you?" Most libraries, and I'm being straight up with you, aren't like our library. And that's with cause, because they don't have a mission of a large international genealogy collection. They're really focused. And we need to be aware of that focus. We have such disinterested family members that we have drive-by donations. You've heard of drive-by shootings? Well, a drive-by donation is almost as injurious to your collection as a drive-by shooting is to a person. The family members, they have that guilt thing. And it's like, "Oh, I'll just take it to a library." Some of them literally walk in the front door with an empty citrus fruit box filled like that duffel bag with all kinds of stuff, leave it on the security desk, and start to turn before the security officer is able to say, "Do you want a receipt for that?" "Nope, nope, nope. I'm fine." They'll call us up and say, "We're three minutes from your loading dock. We have a truck full of family papers." There are many institutions that will just tell you, "Keep driving." All that is a long way of saying every library won't accept it. And decreasing numbers of libraries are accepting unorganized materials. Judgement-free zone again--most of our collections are personal research collections. Challenge me if you don't believe it. Most of them are relatively unorganized. We need to change that if we're interested in pushing our things forward. Most libraries have so much activity that they literally are drinking from a fire hose. I mean, so many things coming in, and here comes this unorganized collection of what really could be valuable stories, valuable biographies, valuable genealogies. They don't have the time, the bandwidth, the attention, to pay to it. I've thought about and talked about during this conference the really critical situation that most of us are in when we're doing research. And I think that same critical situation applies to our research that we're looking to have preserved and presented to future generations. We cannot have our records, nor can we have our research in the hands of disinterested others. That's a recipe for failure. And so about 25 percent of the libraries that people interact with are not interested parties for your particular research papers, hence the four emojis up on the screen. So most libraries are very unhappy to take your stuff. It kind of hearkens back to Amy's slide where she said, "They have to care"--when she was talking about family members--"They have to be interested." If the library doesn't care and a library's not interested, even if they accept it, the chances for its longevity in that collection are in peril. You have some libraries that are happy. You have some libraries that are mad that you've burdened them with a collection that's going to require a lot of care and feeding. And what are they going to do with something that requires a lot of care and feeding? They're going to move it on, not move it onto their shelves, not move it on to their archive, but move it on to the recycle bin. And then there's the poor archivist librarian who's really not equipped and just overwhelmed. And it's like leaving your stories, your documents, in the hands of people that really don't have a clue how to deal with it--that's not a recipe for success either. So let's talk about some real solutions. We've talked about a lot of situations. And I think many of us can relate to those situations. But what are some real solutions? These are really pedestrian, really elementary building blocks, to have an insurance plan to make sure that our collections get presented. But they're really meaningful. The biggest, the best house, hall, is built on really solid foundation. So some real solution--Be wise and organize. That's a catchy little phrase. How many of us really organize our research? My belief--this is Curt's personal opinion--everyone should have a personal data management program, in 2018, where you're keying things in, all the facts, and that you're making digital images of your documents, whether they're photo copies of a county history, a vital record, a census record, and attaching those to the individuals. Why? Because that's like instant oatmeal and instant cream of wheat. It's an instant organization. If you choose not to do that, you need to come up with some really clear, basic ways of organizing your information. This happened late 2016. Two women who had been friends for their entire lives got into genealogy about 20 years before one of them passed. They went all over the country researching together. And the one woman came after her friend had died to look at the donated collection that we did spend a lot of time, a lot of time, organizing this already organized collection. And this is a quote from her. I was with her as she was trying to take me to task for organizing the collection incorrectly. And we did organize it incorrectly. But this was part of her quote. "We researched together for 20 years. We even share a collateral line! I don't recognize this material!" To me, this is exhibit A for why it needs to be clearly and plainly organized, not for us, who put it together, but for people who have never looked at the file before, people who aren't even genealogists or family historians. It has to be that clear. If we're serious about moving, planning to have our records and our story pushed forward, we have to organize. It's really, really basic. If we choose not to use a geological data management program, then you need to get serious about paper organization and spend some money. Folder stuff. Pardon the technical term stuff, but folder stuff. Put things in folder. File by pile is not an organizing method. Well, it is. It's just not a very good-- Okay. --organizing method. I'll accept that. Okay. We've all been on research trips where we come home and we just have this honeycomb kind of stack of papers. And some snowy day or when the electricity is off or something, we start combing through the paper. And we find copy 1 of this record. Oh, here's a second copy further down in the strata of file by pile. Oh, here's a third copy. We're so unorganized, we don't even know what we have, which, as an information professional--just being honest--makes me wonder about the veracity of the research that's being done, if we can't even keep track of what it is that we're finding. So we need to folder stuff, whether it's physically foldering things in folders, as you see in the background of the slide, or whether it's foldering things electronically. And don't folder them with cute little abbreviations. If you use abbreviations, have a code to that. Make it so that someone from a different country who barely knows English can look at your filing system, who doesn't care about genealogy, and say, in five to seven minutes, "I know what's here. And I know how it's organized." It's really important. Okay, so Curt talked a lot about paper. And you know, I've been guilty of file by pile and going through the strata. It's like, "Oh, wait, I went too far. I know it's not this far deep." But paper is one thing, because paper we can see it. We can feel it. We can touch it. We can physically move it around. It's fairly easy to organize paper. It's fairly straightforward. We just have to decide to do it. But then there's the digital stuff. Let's talk a little bit about bytes, because there are some issues with the digital files, the first being that, okay, they're not physical. They're just a bunch of ones and zeros stored on your computer. And with that comes a whole set of other issues that you really don't have or at least not to the degree that you have with paper organization. And the first issue that we really have if we want our digital materials to last beyond us is we have to think very basically about access. Think about everything that you have stored on your computer or on your smartphone or in the cloud somewhere. You have a Dropbox. You have a Google Drive.

When you're gone, does anybody have the password to your computer?

I heard some nervous laughter at that question. But think about it. That's the very basic question, because if somebody can't get into your computer, how are they going to save what was on that computer? So we have to think about things like passwords-- And so, Amy, I gave someone my collection of passwords like 16 months ago. Those are still good--aren't they?--because we never change our passwords, do we? Yeah, only when we go to a website and it's like, "I don't remember my password. Oh, I'll click this link to reset my password." Yeah, that. We have to think about the password for our computer. We have to think about the password for our smartphone. We have to think about passwords for our social media, for all of our genealogy accounts. What about all those places where we've had our DNA tested?

Do you have current passwords stored someplace where a trusted individual could get access if something were to happen to you? And taking that one step further, we need to think about the concept of legacy contacts. Because if something happens to you and you have all this social media, you have all of these genealogy accounts, whether it's on Ancestry or Findmypast or wherever--and when you're gone, somebody's going to have to take care of that. Now, some places they actually have a place. Like, Facebook will actually let you go into your settings, and you can set someone as your legacy contact. So when you're gone, that person can provide documentation to Facebook that you are no longer with us. And then they will have access to your Facebook account. And they can see all of the, you know, cat memes that you liked and all of the--you know. So some places like Facebook have it set up within the system. Family Tree DNA also has something set up within their system. Other places don't have that built into their system yet. But that doesn't mean that you can't set someone up as a legacy contact, whether you have it set up in your will or a power of attorney, but that you need to have someone who you are giving authorization to access and maintain that account when you're no longer with us. And you need to think about not just your computer, but thinking about your social media, all of those genealogy sites, and all of those places where you've had your DNA tested. And considering all of the sales that have been going on in the Expo Hall, I think everybody is testing with everybody this weekend. So there's a few things we need to take care of. So that's just thinking about access. We also need to think about the files themselves. I'm going to show you a dinosaur.

I'm not going to ask for show the hands. But how many of you remember the 3-and-1/2-inch floppy drive, a little floppy disk? What about the 10-inch Bernoulli drive? Remember that? All right, a couple of you. Awesome. Yeah, I don't remember that one. My uncle invented it. Oh, nice. So let's say that you still have a 3-and-1/2-inch floppy disk with a nice family file on it. Okay, one, let's assume that that disk is still good, which is a huge assumption. What computer are you going to access it with? When was the last time you saw a computer with a 3-and-1/2-inch drive? It's been a while.

What about CDs? I remember when CDs came out. I'm sure you remember when CDs came out. They were awesome. Because you could store a lot more stuff than you could store on a little 3-and-1/2-inch disk And it was going to last forever. It was awesome. It was a great media because it was no longer magnetic. Because there was a problem with magnetic media. It gets demagnetized. If you have ever had that happen to your credit card, you know what I'm talking about. You don't want to get demagnetized. So CDs, DVDs, that was supposed to cure all that. Well, the problem with CDs and DVDs is that they are susceptible to light. Some of them--they actually encode the data with a special photosensitive dye. And they're all susceptible to scratches. You give a good scratch on a CD or DVD and, sorry, you just made yourself a nice coaster. Yeah.

And when was the last time that you saw a new computer with a CD or DVD drive? You can still buy external ones. But how long are those going to be available? So if we've been relying upon one format to store all of our digital files, we need to think about, are we refreshing this? Are the files even going to be there so that it makes it to the next generation? And then I kind of hate to bring this up, because it seems to be an uncomfortable subject. But that is organization. But it's a subject that's pretty pervasive through our presentation here this afternoon. It kind of is. It kind of is. But there's something about organizing digital stuff. And I think it's because we can't physically pick it up and make nice, neat little piles. No, it's all those ones and zeros. But we have to take care of it with our digital files, because think of it this way. If you can't find your files, neither will they. The they being those people you assume are going to take care of your stuff after you're gone because you've enticed them so nicely to care about it. Or at least guilted them into it for a generation. We have to think about organization. And part of organizing, part of the challenge of organizing digital files, is actually identification.

There's a reason I have a picture of pork chops up here. Recently, my mom and dad were having breakfast. And they have the conversation that they have during most breakfasts, which is, what are we going to have for dinner? Hi, Mom and Dad, if you're watching. So they're having this discussion over breakfast of what they're going to have for dinner. And they remember this package of pork chops that's been in the freezer for a while. I think we've all had that. You know, that package of pork chops has been in the freezer for a while. We better use those up. Okay, dinner solved. So they get out the pork chops. And they thaw them out. Well, come time to start fixing dinner, open up the freezer paper and, huh, those aren't pork chops. It was a round steak. So, okay, we're not having pork chops. We're going to have round steak. I mean, no big deal in the grand scheme of things. But we have the same problem with our digital files. It's like, what is in this package? Because we end up with these wonderfully intuitive file names, like DSC_1298.JPG. Oh, I know exactly what that file is. Okay, I know it's an image of some sort, because it's a JPEG. But is it a picture of a tombstone? Is it a picture that I took of an old ancestral photo? Is it a picture that I took at the library? Is it just a picture? You know, is it a selfie that I did in front of the library? I don't know from the file name. But, yes, I realize it can be a pain to rename these files. So at a minimum, at a minimum, at least arrange them in some meaningful folders. And to Curt's point earlier talking about physical folders, give them good names, not something cutesy like, oh, Fun Trip to the Homestead. Okay, that really doesn't help people later. Give them good, meaningful names. And I want to talk just for a moment and challenge you, because it's really beyond the scope of the time that we have here this afternoon. But we all need to learn about something called metadata. Now, when I was in library school--and I think that you probably had the same definition when you were in library school, Curt, that metadata is data about data. I hate that definition because it really doesn't tell us what metadata does. Metadata is information that lets us actually understand what that data is. If you think about a container, like a can of beans-- Or a spice rack. A spice rack. So you know something is in there. It's in the container. The wrapper is the metadata. It tells you what's in the container, how many calories, how much sodium, how many carbs, all that stuff, or what's in the spice. But metadata isn't always visible. Yes, I mean, technically the file name is metadata. But the metadata that we really need to learn about is the kind of metadata that's actually embedded within the file. It isn't visible. It isn't visible. It just becomes part of the ones and zeros that makes up the file. But it's in a special way that I can't describe. I don't think anybody can really describe how it works in the ones and zeros. But that metadata is stored as part of the file and is used as part of the file. And it helps you organize that data and helps you find it later. The challenge with metadata is that for all of the wonderful technology that we have, metadata doesn't always transfer very well. And we see this especially with images. There are some great programs that will allow you to embed metadata, things like the description, the location, the names of the people. This is a cookie jar that is sitting on my kitchen counter. And this cookie jar was given to my parents as a wedding present. And they later gave it to me. Well, I can bring it up. I'm a Mac user. I can bring it up in Photos on my Mac and go into the information section in Photos. And I can add things like a description, location. So I could say that this was originally owned by my parents and give their names. I can say when I received it. I can say when they received it. I could list where this cookie jar has lived for the last 60 years. The problem is it doesn't always transfer to somebody else's program. So, again, that's a little bit out of the time that we have today. But I challenge all of us to go learn more about metadata so that we can really utilize it and be able to discover and organize our files better. But one thing that I think all of us have, probably one of the commonalities that we all have here in this room and with everyone watching--genealogy software. My genealogy is so organized because I have everything in my software. Awesome. That's great. And you have it fully sourced. You have documents attached, like Curt was talking about. And that's wonderful. But ask yourself this. How do you expect others to get that information out? We're talking about nongenealogists here. You know, you're trying to get this to last beyond you, right? So if you have everything stored in your genealogy software, which is a good way to organize it, but you're asking a nongenealogist, one, to recognize that that's a genealogy program--which, that's a challenge right there. Then then you're asking them to figure out how to navigate that genealogy software. And then you have to hope that they figure out what all of that means. You're asking them to be a genealogist.

I don't know about you, but I think that's asking a lot. And I don't see that being a real successful way of making sure that our research lasts beyond us.

So we've had a lot of details that we've been chewing on through the minutes that we've shared together. And maybe we should really embrace these two terms, intentional and purposeful.

If we want our genealogy to last beyond us, if we want our stories to last beyond us, for as much as we all have time deficits for things we like to do, like family history, like story, we are going to have to make time, take time, create time, if that's possible, to be intentional and purposeful. What do I mean? We have to intentionally make a decision about becoming more organized. We have to intentionally decide when we go to a courthouse or we spend two and a half hours in the middle of the night online downloading documents that right then, right there, we will create some kind of nongenealogical context, some labels, some folders, some file names, that make sense to everyday peeps and get those documents, those images, those conclusions, those records into a spot physically and or virtually that makes sense. And we really have to start, like, yesterday. That's not a 2019 New Year's resolution. That's not when the weather warms up. That's not when I'm done with the latest stress in my life. If you really want to engage in finding and presenting, preserving, story, you need to be intentional now. Some of these things that we discussed, Amy and I, over the last hour or so or less than an hour--you might think this is really basic. Yes, but how many of us do that all the time? If I was a betting person, and I'm not, but I'll offer a hypothesis that less than 25 percent of the people in this room are intentional or purposeful about what they've done with their discoveries and their conclusions. And I guess that leads me to the next thought. What am I doing? What in the world am I doing? I know there are frustrating dead ends to our genealogical research. And we've probably have asked this question in a number of different sort of venues, if you will: like, "Oh my gosh, why did I ever start doing genealogy? It's so frustrating. I make a couple of discoveries that just leads to more brick walls. And I've been working on this one brick wall for 40 years." But for the purposes of this presentation, what are we doing with our research notes and our conclusions or end results? That's a big aspect of how we're going to push what we are going to push forward. We are asked all the time in the Genealogy Center--I'm sure many of you have been asked or have asked the question--"So what is it that I should preserve? Do I preserve all of it? just the documents? the primary source documents? Do I just preserve the basic begats and begots? the hatched, matched, and dispatched facts and move on? Do I do that plus photographs? To the previous slide, we have to be intentional. We need to decide what it is that we're going to do. There are many who come on both sides of this particular dilemma. And Amy and I and our colleagues have discussed this, sometimes almost debated it. If you've captured images of documents, we don't know in 50 years whether those documents will still be in the courthouse or the archive or the library. So it could be really important to preserve all document images. It really could be important, and this is where I fall. If you found it consequential enough to make a photocopy of a county history as well as the census record, a passenger list, a probate packet, and hundreds of photographs, if that was important enough to make a digital image of that or make a paper copy that, I would argue it's important enough to package in a way that it can be brought forward. There are others who say, and it's perfectly legitimate, "No, that's really too formidable of a task for 99 percent of the people. What we really need to bring forward are the conclusions, the end results. Here is my family, neat and tidy. Here's the major photographs that document or evidence important life events, christenings, funerals, marriages, a school graduation, maybe the favorite vacation." I'm of the other school where if it's consequential enough for us to have, again, captured it and made it a part of our records, then why not bring it forward. But it's a huge organizational challenge, because I'm not invalidating anything I've said this hour up to this point. I'm not saying, "Oh, so you want to keep everything, your research notes, everything? Well, then you really don't have to be very organized." No, just the opposite--you have to be even more committed to a logical organizational scheme that an everyday person who doesn't know anything about family history or about your family can look at it and say, "Huh, there are family groups here. These documents are in these folders, virtual or real, for these family groups. That must be a relationship there. Somehow these documents are related to these peeps." We have to be intentional. We have to ask ourselves, what am I doing. And then how do I want my research to be brought forward? It's not a trivial matter. And you can fall somewhere in between "I'm keeping everything," "I'm only keeping my conclusions." But usually, it's one or the other. And we need to be intentional about it. If we keep kicking the can down the road, you know what we've done? We've kicked our genealogy and our stories into the recycle bin. It's just that simple. Because you may guilt someone for a generation, but it will be gone because no one cares.

So we've talked a lot about organization. So let's talk about another topic that is kind of uncomfortable for a lot of us. And that is writing.

And this isn't a talk about actual research, you know, the research process. We're trying to save the research and get it preserved. But part of the genealogical proof standard is that you write your conclusion. Now, I'm a big proponent of writing. I think that there are a lot of discoveries that we make in the writing process. But oh my gosh, writing is a four-letter word: work. It's lots of work. Even very good writers that we think words just drip off the end of their fountain pen or off their keyboard, they'll tell you it's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. It's not a trivial endeavor. It is a lot of work. And I think for so many of us, when we think about just even the concept of writing the family history, for some reason we picture the book. We think that writing the family history means that we have to pick an ancestral couple, the further back the better, and we trace all of their descendants. And we end up with this multihundred page tome that is the definitive work of this ancestral couple. Why do we think that? I don't know why, but it just seems so ingrained in us that, you know, "Oh, I'm writing the family history." You know, it doesn't have to be that way, okay? And we are doing ourselves a disservice when we think so big, because we think that we can't write it until it's complete, because, you know, oh, we have to start with this ancestral couple. And we have to find all of the descendants before we can publish the book. It has to be complete. I hate to break it to you, but if you're waiting to write your family history until it's complete, it will never be written. It will never be written, because the thing about genealogy--it's never complete. You're never done. You are never done. I mean, honestly, I think that's the beauty of family history. But if there is no complete, then you're never going to write if that's what you're waiting for. So instead, I challenge everyone to think instead of writing about the entire family, what's wrong with focusing, say, on just one person?

Think back to your high school English class--the who, what, when, where, and why. And it doesn't even have to be the entire story of that one person, maybe just one aspect of their life. And it doesn't even need to be all those questions either. No, it doesn't. I mean, truthfully, pick a couple. Pick a couple. I could write--and it doesn't have to be pages and pages and pages. It could be a couple of paragraphs. I could write a couple of paragraphs about my great-grandfather John Ramsey, shown here in this picture, about how he was a farmer. And he was burning off his fields, getting them ready to plant. And they still don't know what happened: if he had a heart attack and collapsed or if the fire turned on him. But they found him after the fire had burned off the field. I could write just a couple of paragraphs about that and how my mom was told by one of her classmates that he had been found, just a couple of things like that. We could even tell the story of one event or one document, because, okay, we are really good at reading old handwriting, right? Not everybody has that superpower. And as we talked in the keynote on Wednesday evening, that's one of the challenges, that fewer and fewer people are able to read cursive. But we can read not only current stuff, we can read the old stuff. Hey, let's tap into that. So let's take one document and explain it so that even a nongenealogist can understand it. You know that 75-page Civil War pension file? You know all the stories that are represented in that pension file. Write it up so that even a nongenealogist can understand it. And know your audience. If there's a family member--a cousin, a niece, a nephew, a child, a grandchild--that you know has a special interest in something and you know of an ancestral story, write it up so they can make that connection, so they can care about it. Don't wait. Don't feel like you have to wait to write the great big book, because, as one of my blog readers, Arlene Baker, when we were discussing this, she said, "A few little books are better than the one big book I'll never write." Absolutely. I would also challenge us to think beyond the book. It doesn't have to be something written. It doesn't have to be something that has a spine, a front cover, and a back cover. What about making a movie or an audio file or a slide show or doing a photo album or a scrapbook? The point is to get this stuff out of our genealogy software. Get this stuff out of our folders, whether they are physical folders or digital folders. Get it out of our files and into a format that others will understand and enjoy, because truly, people will only save what they care about. And if it's in some format that is completely foreign to them, you've lost them. And they've lost what you were trying to save.

Another topic I think that needs our attention is the whole idea of sharing beyond our family, sharing beyond your family. And there's two sides or two aspects of that. Even if we have immediate family, children and grandchildren, who don't care, I can guarantee there will be your descendents somewhere along the line who will care. So it is of consequence to save it for them. We live in an awesome time period, where we can digitally record our images, our voice. And just watch what's going to happen with all the DNA testing and the advancing that's going on. Right now, we're close to creating holographic forms of ancestors based on DNA gathered and based on our voice and DNA combos. In the future, soon, we'll be able to see and talk with our ancestors and our descendants. We'll be able to do that from digital files we have left. It's of huge consequence. As Steve Rockwood said Wednesday night in his keynote, one by one, one by one, we save this story. And it saves it for the grandchildren of great-grandchildren, whom we will never meet. The family you don't know now, the family that will come after you, those who lived and worked and played and prayed with your family and their descendants--they do value your story. Do you value it enough to take the steps we've talked about this hour? We need modest--nothing big and earth shattering. Have we said anything that even approaches rocket science this hour? Not even close. We need deliberate, intentional acts. Those are the things that make the difference in our stories being passed forward. We've said this a couple of times. Face it: we'll never be done. So don't wait to get done to finish up the organizing, to do the writing, to do the recording. Do it now. We cannot let perfection impede progress. It will never be perfect. We're not perfect. And the last bullet point I want to spend just a few moments talking about--you don't have to wait to donate. So in other words, you don't have to wait until you're gone to push it forward. Why not--when you're at a family reunion, a holiday gathering, and you notice someone is interested in a branch, a person, a photograph, a video recording--why not push a copy to them? Why not take a little extra time? Why not write those vignettes, those short little stories about what you know they're interested in? And pass them around not just to one person at that family reunion, but get it in the hands of everybody, because the more that you can get out there, the more likely that something is going to last. Lots of copies keep stuff safe. So if we can get more copies out there now, it increases the odds of something making it through. And remember mythical solution number two? Oh, the library--they'll take it. And you know, there's nothing worse than a drive-by donation that's kind of like figuratively thrown in the front door as this person is burning rubber down the road. Talk to libraries or institutions that you believe are interested. Talk to them now. Maybe donate some of your collection now or a copy of your collection or some digital files now. Begin a dialogue where, I hate to use the word control, but you have a little bit of control over what happens. You're not relying on disinterested others to push your stories forward, to preserve your stories. So you don't have to wait to donate. Interact with family members, even distant family members. We've throughout this entire conference been finding and identifying cousins all over the place. We have all kinds of opportunities. We can start today.

So just thinking about all of the time that we've spent, all of the effort that we all have spent to find these ancestors, to make these discoveries, to uncover their stories, if we don't make it a part of our research process, if we don't consider, if we don't be deliberate and intentional about taking those relatively simple steps--we just have to take them--but if we're not intentional about it, then we're doing ourselves a disservice and we're doing a disservice to our ancestors and those in future generations who aren't going to be able to find it because it never made it to them. We have about five minutes for questions. Because this is being taped, there is a microphone in the back-center of the room. If you have a question, if you could go to the microphone, that would be awesome. We thank you very much for your attention this afternoon. And we would be so pleased if you would actually maybe give some time and attention to some organization. Pursue, preserve, present--that's what we want to do as family historians, as storytellers. Thanks. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

Thank you for what you shared. I got a lot of good information from this. I was wondering if you have any resources or examples of ways to share your research in a way that is presentable and that people care in the future about your research. I know you shared some file-organizing ideas. But is there anything else, any examples? One thing that always pops to my mind--and great question. Thank you for that. Our story, our words--it doesn't have to be perfect English. I know my English teachers are all turning over in their grave. You can misspell. You can have bad syntax. I know they're turning over again in their grave. Truly, the story in our words--my children benefited from letters that their ancestors wrote. Sloppy English, poor English--but they were recounting their lives. So as Amy mentioned, you know, writing those vignettes, those short little stories, so not just presenting here's a genealogical data management file or here's a PDF, and you can see all the different generations--having your words on that compilation, on that record, makes a lot of difference. It's that high touch, that personal. Yeah, and to add to that I would say anything that you can do to make that ancestor human, because we innately understand that because we've been researching them. And we kind of get to know them. I think, you know, everybody here probably has a favorite ancestor, because they somehow seem more real to us. But it's because we have been working in their records for so long that we feel like we really know them. So we need to take that and pull out the stories, pull out the discoveries, and sort of translate that into nongenealogist, just taking it and boiling it down. Like Curt said, it doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be done. Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]