Passing It On

What would your ancestors think about your stuff?

Quick now, take a look around you. How many things do you own that are 10 years old? 20 years old? Older? If you’re like me, the answers are a few, not many, even fewer.

Now think about your grandparents and their possessions. Your answers to the same questions are probably much different.

Lori Thornton at Smoky Mountain Historian got me thinking about our changing consumption habits with her post on how she had to replace a perfectly good scanner because her new computer operating system couldn’t use it. Giles Slade’s observations in this Christian Science Monitor article show how cutting-edge, innovative Apple uses planned obsolescence to stimulate sales of its phenomenally successful iPod.

And while I knew that young folks have largely abandoned reading print newspapers, I had no idea that teens were similarly abandoning wristwatches, presumably because digital clocks are built into virtually everything electronic these days.

Without getting too far off topic here, our consumer society simply can’t continue on this unsustainable path of planned obsolescence. Our landfills are filling fast with the toxic remains of discarded PCs, cell phones and portable music devices with millions of soon-to-be-antiquated analog TVs waiting in the wings.

The pace of American consumption, which has quickened at an exponential rate since World War II, will likely be suppressed by economic and environmental realities in the not-so-distant future. Our descendants may find consumer habits of the past 60 years or so bewildering. Are you tracking the change for them?

As you write your own family history, consider seriously how your ancestors influenced your own buying habits. Write, too, of what you hope your own children and grandchildren have learned from yours.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo of  Colorado landfill courtesy of Jason Kosena.

What did you have for breakfast on April 4, 1996?

What if you could record every moment of your life in a searchable digital file? It may soon be possible.

If Microsoft’s MyLifeBits Project seems a bit Orwellian to you, consider that it has its roots in the 1945 vision of Vannevar Bush who envisioned a desktop “device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”

Bush called his dream contraption a “memex.” Today you might call it a PC.

Microsoft is taking a two-pronged approach to realizing Bush’s vision – investigating lifelong storage on the one hand while developing appropriate software on the other. For the past decade, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been putting the concept to the test, creating an ever-expanding digital record of his life.

Stefani Twyford, a videographer and blogging friend from Houston, Texas, brought the project to my attention while raising the question: Is this really a good idea? My short answer is “I don’t think so.” You can find my long answer in the comments section of Stefani’s blog.

What do you think? Would such a comprehensive digital record be of value or interest to your descendants?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Gordon Bell on cover of Fast Company magazine courtesy of brewbooks.

Saving the seeds of your family tree

It’s the ultimate backup: a three-room condo dug 400 feet deep into the permafrost of a Norwegian mountain, its steel and concrete design engineered to withstand earthquakes and a direct nuclear strike.

It’s the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a modern-day Noah’s Ark, intended to be a backup for the world’s 1,400 seed banks. With a capacity of 4.5 million seeds, Svalbard can keep seeds for 1,000 years in its subzero vaults. Even if the power fails, seeds stored there should be viable for two centuries.

Svalbard was inaugurated this week, too late to save the seed banks wiped out by war in Iraq and Afghanistan or by a typhoon in the Philippines.

Reading about the Svalbard project got me thinking about how I save the seeds of my own family’s history. We all know the value of backing up our electronic files, but how many of us actually do it? Just as the death of a loved one robs us of an opportunity to tap into their wealth of family knowledge, the crash of a hard drive could wipe out decades of work in an instant.

Take a few minutes to consider how you protect your precious files. Satisfied? If not, you might want to consider using an online storage site (for a fee) or an online e-mail site like Gmail or Yahoo (free). Other options can be found on my earlier post on the subject.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of entrance to Svalbard Global Seed Vault courtesy of sophsrome.

The data you save may be your own

 

Poor Hattie Harl.

Hattie spent 10 years in the early 1900s doing research and writing about the history of my home town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, only to see all her work go up in smoke in a Dec. 3, 1925, fire at the Grand Hotel.

Fires. Floods. Theft. Carelessness. There are lots of ways that a person's hard work can be whisked away. In this computer age, you can add electronic glitches to the list. Regardless of how it happens, such a loss is infuriating.

Have any of these happened to you?:

• Your idle computer starts chattering away and won't let you access anything on its hard drive.

• While working away on your desktop, you're suddenly staring at the infamous "blue screen of death" while your operating system performs a "physical memory dump" in your stunned presence.

• After "upgrading" software, nothing seems to work as well as before.

• After de-fragmenting your hard drive, e-mail disappears from your Inbox.

If any of these sound familiar, you're not alone. They've all happened to me. That's why I take care to routinely back up my data files. Even that's not foolproof, but my diligence has saved me on more than one occasion.

Here's what I do.

Every day I save my work on a flash drive. I'm using those new ones that have software on the drive that allow me to easily synchronize my e-mail and data files. I use a separate drive for each computer. I've been warned that flash drives have high failure rates, so I don't rely on them completely.

Once a week, I back up my files on a CD. I've never had much luck with rewritables so I use CD-Rs. I keep the most recent copies in my office in case I need to salvage something (which occasionally occurs because of some boneheaded mistake I've made) while older files go off-site to a safe deposit box at a bank.

CDs are flaky, too. Once every month or so, I burn my files onto the same gold CDs that I use for my personal history clients. Besides giving them a copy at the conclusion of a project, I make an archive copy for the safe deposit box.

There are other ways to back up copy - separate hard drives, for example. The manner in which you save data is a personal matter, but it's important that you have some sort of system in place before one of those inevitable computer calamities hits you.

You can learn more about the trouble with flash drives here. Here's a story about the loss of important documents and another story about the perils of pirated software.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Melissa King Photography.