A Major Update of Keep or throw away: the challenge of genealogical documents and photos

 

Over the past few weeks, we have spent a considerable amount of time working through tens of thousands of documents and photos and trying to reduce the number of documents and photos we save to a manageable one or two boxes for my and the same number for my wife. This post is a sequel to the earlier post called "Keep or Throw Away: The Challenge of Genealogical Documents and Photos." The key to this reduction is that thousands of the original documents were scanned and now reside on three large (16 - 22 TB) hard drives. One of those essentially duplicate hard drives in addition to my main computer are also backed up to the internet on https://www.backblaze.com/. Some of the documents, such as original journals, will also be offered to the BYU Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections. 

There are still some major decisions that need to be made. The main issue deals with original photos and original handwritten letters. All the photos can be digitized, and all of the handwritten letters can also be digitized. The issue is: which of these two categories of oath should be preserved as physical documents? 

Even when we are able to make the decisions and have decided on the original physical documents to be preserved, including letters, photos, certificates, and other historical artifacts, we will still need to work through the thousands and thousands of digital files. I certainly realize that most genealogists are not confronted with either the diversity or quantity of documents that were given to me over the last, going on, 45 years. 

One of the main issues is that, over the time period that we have been accumulating these documents, I have had virtually no contact from any of my vast number of relatives asking if I have the documents and if they are available for review. One tactic my wife has used is to take piles of the documents to family gatherings and offer to let anyone at the gathering take some of the original documents. Of course, all the documents offered have already been digitized also. 

Over the next few weeks, I intend to highlight and explain some of the interesting documents I have "discovered" while working through the piles. Here is an initial. example.

 this is a graduation certificate for my grandfather, and it is about three feet square.

Stay tuned for further developments.