Family history

[watervole]

I've been rooting through a load of old family documents.  AuntyGillian has offered to try and sort out the family tree and put it online.  I had a go at it when my children were small and made a lot of progress, but that was pre-Internet days.  Now, it makes much better sense to link family members by proper links than by page references.  And documents can now be scanned, which means that all of the family will have access to things.

I've found some documents that I'd thought were lost.  Letters written from the trenches in 1917 by my great uncle.  A letter from my grandfather to my grandmother telling her about the bombing in Manchester.  My great-grandfather's battle with the Carnegie Trust over some property in Dunfermline.  A random selection of lives -mostly determined by what my grandmother chose to keep.

A whole pile of photographs, many sadly unlabelled.  Who is the young woman with long, dark, curly hair who chose to fancy-dress as a gypsy for the photographer? Or the distinguished man with the Victorian beard?

What will future generations choose to keep of us?

Why does a handwritten letter convey so much more than an old email?

How ephemeral is the Internet?

Comments

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

I think it has something to do with a letter being concrete, that it was handled by the person who wrote it and the one who read it and now by you. It is a physical link with the past that letters on a screen don't have for our generation. When letters are a thing of the past, like the clay tablets of ancient Sumeria perhaps that generation will have the same frizon over email as we do over old letters.

[decemberleaf.livejournal.com]

"... a physical link..." Yes!! Just so.