Important documents:
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
One difficult decision facing family historians is how to preserve our research results. These may be paper records, photographs, or physical objects of any size or material. I don’t have the answer. There is no single answer, but any effort at preservation is better than none.
Family Searcher
By Nina Brawn 
There is a great movement to preserve records digitally on computers and discs because a huge volume of paper can be reduced to a small area. There are three major problems with this, and the first example is from efforts of Lowell, Massachusetts to digitize current records.
Lowell is going to electronically save all the town records and destroy the originals! This is extreme; there are so many repositories whose specific purpose is records preservation. Early Lowell vital records were destroyed by fire; the town should understand and reconsider the danger of destroying current valuable records. I know from personal experience that Lowell’s missing records have created irreparable holes in family history research.
The second problem with digitizing records is the uncertain quality of discs. National Archives research shows that there is no way to verify disc quality. Discs within the same package can be made by different manufacturers, and some factories cut corners. Although expensive discs seem to more often be of good quality, even this is not a reliable predictor for individual discs. Some discs may only last for months before they begin to deteriorate, some may last for decades.
The third problem is ever-changing technologies and lack of money, which go hand-in-hand to create the probability that technology will change faster than archivists can keep up with it, and old formats will become unreadable with the available equipment. This may be the main reason why it is important to continue to preserve fragile original documents and artifacts.
It is important to remember that when a copy is made, some quality is lost. We’ve all seen this when making a copy of a photocopy. Especially with electronic photographs saved with the popular “.jpg” file extension. Every photo saved as a jpeg loses some information every time it gets saved, so within a few saves you will begin to notice lines appearing in your precious photos. I have now changed my scanner to auto-save in a different format such as .tif, .gif. or png. Although this takes up more room, you are less likely to lose copy quality. (However you may need to resave in a different format so that others’ programs can read them.)
Finally save your “product” in different formats and different places. I utilize Ancestry.com for my family tree repository, but I back it up frequently to my computer, and occasionally to computer disk and try to remember to make paper copies as well. There are paper and disc copies scattered with various family members so everything will not get lost, no matter what catastrophe befalls Ancestry or my home.
Consider what you have, and how many ways you can “copy” it, and be sure to disperse it. Remember that local historical societies, libraries and others may be very happy to hold a copy of your research.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
