Succession Planning

 Who would you like to inherit your family history treasures?

This is a serious question. I have heard too many stories of people inheriting Granny's genealogy and tossing it in a dumpster because they had higher priorities at that point in their lives.

A previously unknown cousin contacted me and said "When Great Grandpa Watson died, Grandpa went back to the old farm, cleared out the house, and burned all of the photos and papers, Until my nephew discovered your blog, we knew nothing of our Watson history We did not even know we had Scottish ancestors." I was glad to be able to fill in a lot of missing family history,

Last week we had a visit from a cousin and his wife. I was happy to give them a plastic tote containing about 800 old photos that used to belong to his grandmother, I was really happy that he was interested in having this family treasure, No one else had expressed an interest.. 

But fortunately I also had a good "Plan B", that may work for you too.

After inheriting those photos myself, two years previously, I decided to scan all of those where we could identify the people, upload these photos to the Memories area of FamilySearch.org and tag them to the people's records in Family Tree. And if there was no portrait photo, I would choose one of the newly-scanned photos as that person's portrait, 

Other sites may work equally well. Why did I choose FamilySearch? Personal experience was probably the biggest factor, But there are other important factors.

1. Access is always free. Other sites may move things behind a "pay wall" at any time,

2. Their rules are simple and straight forward.

3, FamilySearch's parent, "The Genealogy Society of Utah" was created in 1894 and has been preserving genealogies ever since.  So I am confident that they will continue to do so.

But whatever site you choose, I encourage you to preserve your family history online in a safe place. That way it will be available to future generations of your family, even if the paper copies are destined to the dumpster.