One of our major goals for 2017 was to continue ridding the house of all the paper by digitizing as much as we possibly could.  I’ve made some great progress, but, I’ve definitely been avoiding two big, full boxes of old, OLD family documents that have been stuffed in the corner of a closet of every house that I’ve lived in since 1999.  The stuff in these boxes is from the 1800’s and holds a lot of really valuable information about my family’s earlier ancestors.  And, that no one else has copies of.

The reality is, I’m pretty lucky that nothing terrible has happened to any of these precious documents throughout my numerous moves and storage units since 1999.  Since the documents are originals and, to my knowledge, none of my family has copies of the documents, being able to share them with my family in a long-term way is important to me, too.  Since I’m only a fire, roof leak or naughty dog day away from losing all of those precious documents that can never be replaced, it’s long overdue that I came up with a permanent solution.

In an effort to help anyone else who’s into genealogy or family history research and looking to organize and immortalize the past while minimizing the present clutter, I’ve put together a mini-series of posts that may help.  This is the introduction for the 4 part mini-series focused on immortalizing a family’s history by moving away from keeping paper copies and files.  Feel free to add your thoughts, suggestions and comments as we go along!

PART 1: Trials and Errors

PART 2: Organizing Needs

PART 3: Discovering WikiTree

PART 4: Making The Past The Future