Today, as I watch the Notre Dame Cathedral in flames, I know I cannot put this post off any longer. Our research is a fragile thing, if dependent upon paper files. It’s unsafe if dependent upon a single copy in any form. Not even two copies will save it in a disaster, if both are kept together. You’ve heard it all before. You need to commit to paperless genealogy. But today, please hear it and act.
Genealogy is worth doing, just for the sheer joy of it. I think we can all agree on that. But as the hours turn into weeks and weeks to years, and the work amasses, the idea of losing it all and starting over becomes unbearable. Indeed, it becomes unfeasible. The records you discovered long ago, in a faraway courthouse, may not be found again. The courthouse is gone. Your copy of a specific bill of sale is now the only one in the world. On paper. In a house that could burn.
Facing my paper addiction
My cure of a former addiction to paper happened in 2011. I loved having everything printed out. In my office on the University of Alabama campus, I had seven work surfaces—tables, desks, and a lateral filing cabinet—as I recall. Every surface was covered with stacks of paper and folders—some a foot high. Beneath many of those surfaces were drawers, more folders. And two closets full of boxes of old files—inherited from my predecessor in the job.
As the piles grew higher, I grew more stressed. I was working on a PhD in history, while holding down a full-time job as a magazine editor. I knew that there were things buried in every stack that represented unfinished business—a promise failed, a colleague disappointed, a treasure lost, an opportunity wasted. I could not sleep any more.
One day, I looked around and knew that this was no way to work. My stress would not go away until I had handled every single piece of paper. I made a commitment that day that my full-time job, until it was done, was to clear every single piece of paper off every single surface. Same with the drawers and the closets.
Paperlessness—getting it done
As I picked up each piece of paper, there were these choices: trash it, recycle it, scan and save it, deal with it immediately, or (only if a paper version was mandatory) file it.
It took five days—from a Thursday through the following Monday. I stuffed huge blue recycling bags, one after the other, and felt lighter as each left the building. It became clear that most of what I had stored on those surfaces was no longer of use. No surprise, there were a ridiculous number of duplicates.
It forced me to create a filing system on our computer server that still serves me to this day. And for the first time in my life, I knew where to find everything. I knew what needed to be done. I could find, view, and modify the records from my home office or from a hotel on the road. I could do my job with one table (no drawers) and a laptop.
I could sleep again.
Then there was Thursday
Three days after I completed this monumental project, tornadoes tore through the U.S. southern states. April 29, 2011. One of them ripped up a huge swath of our town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, coming within a few blocks of my office. You can see an image of the rubble at the head of this post. Seven thousand buildings were gone in minutes. And sixty-four people.
After my initial shock, I realized something. Had my building been taken, I would have been back in business as soon as I had a new computer. I was ready for a disaster.
Since that day, I have tried to treat paper as a disease. For reasons unknown, paper attracts paper, and piles beget piles. Paper has to be dealt with before it spreads. Before it suffocates you.
Then there was paperless genealogy
As soon as I finished my PhD dissertation, I pulled back out my genealogy box—neglected for years. All the family history work I had ever done was on paper. Paper collected when “Internet” was a new word, and our “cloud” did not yet exist.
I was lucky, though. It was just one box, which I computerized before I started any of the new fun.
From the start of my genealogy resurrection, everything was computerized with automatic syncing to a cloud. It therefore exists on my computer (with backups on the same computer, in case of corrupted data) and in a facility in another state on their servers and on their backups, which are taken off-site. Four copies of everything. Three separate locations. And then there is the syncing of much of it to Ancestry.com, which does its backups to an off-site facility, surely? So make it six copies. Five locations.
The only papers I will keep are vital certified documents, original letters, and some photographs. And I scan them, too. Not even a full box is required now for paper.
I can get to everything I have collected from any computer with a Wi-fi connection.
The reasons to commit to paperless genealogy
I know you love the paper. I did once, too. If you have to have it, have it. But don’t depend on it. Here’s why.
#1. Paper can be destroyed in seconds—and you have no guarantees that you will be spared tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, or floods. (I’ve been through all of these, except fire, and I still have several decades of living left, I think.)
#2. You can’t carry the paper with you, when you go on research trips. If you commit to the cloud, your work is everywhere you go.
#3. Do you have room for the paper? (Two of the fatalities in the earthquake I survived—the Northridge Earthquake of 1994—were a couple suffocated by the cave-in of stuff piled around their bed.)
#4. How will you do your genealogy when you’re moved to the retirement village or your daughter’s spare room—if you need a full room just for your genealogy collection?
#5. Your kids do not want to inherit your paper. Even if they tell you they want it, they don’t have room for it. So don’t act like you’re doing it for them. You are creating a guilt burden.
#6. Paper (and manila folders and file cabinets and binders and a spare room to hold it all) is expensive. I know. I know. The cloud costs money, too. But it’s a good trade.
How do you start with paperless genealogy?
Well, I’ve already written more than 1,000 words—a no-no for a blogger—so I need to wrap up. But I will leave you with this counsel:
- Start today going paperless with everything you collect from here on out. (For a very thorough guide, see Introduction to Digitizing and Organizing Family Photos and Documents.)
- Read up on Zotero as a way to organize your research without file cabinets, binders, and manila folders.
- Commit a bit of time per week to working through the old material (or do like I did and marathon it until done).
- Get cloud storage to ensure your work is being backed up. You can start with free options, but someday, it will be worth the $99 a year or so to have a service protecting your life’s work and serving it out to you wherever you go.
- Share your work with other people and sites like Ancestry.com, in hopes that others will keep your files updated as technology changes after you have gone. (I realize that paper documents will remain readable to future generations—with no technology changes or updates required—but the paper has to survive, and unless you’re a major celebrity, yours won’t.)
Most importantly of all…commit this day to paperless genealogy. Let the Notre Dame Cathedral be our reminder of what a spark can do to even our most priceless treasures. Let’s commit, in honor of Notre Dame.
I would like to hear more about “how you did it.” What kind of scanner did you use? Document feeder? Legal sized pages? How did you decide what to keep and what to toss? That is my big problem. If I had a document proving a marriage or some other event, and then got another, better one. I kept both. I imagine I have a lot of things I don’t need, but I don’t know how to know that. I would like to know what kind of back ups you use. I have Acronis for a back-up which I hope is doing the job. I also use Dropbox and send over files from to Google Drive, but I don’t think those are really “backups?” I”d really like to get rid of all the binders and file drawers and boxes, but I don’t know how to begin and then how to continue. So much paper!!! And file-naming for files on my computer. I have a sort of system that worked when I didn’t have very many files. But now…
Thanks so much, Marian. I will do that in a future post. I appreciate your interest! My big paper purge was in my magazine editor work, rather than genealogy, but some things will surely apply to both. I absolutely consider the cloud a backup tool, so it sounds like you have some good protection of your digital sources. I’ll begin to work on some ideas for how to work on the backlog. And if others want to reply with how they’re doing it (or ways they’ve tried and wouldn’t recommend) I’d love to hear what you all have to say. I will say (as I say all the time) that Zotero software has made it possible to create a structure on which to build all my genealogy research. It allows me to keep the bigger research together–something our online trees aren’t geared to do. You can read some of what I’ve written about Zotero on my blog here: https://genohistory.com/tag/zotero/. One of the things I love about going digital is that, if you aren’t sure about whether to throw something away, just scan and keep it. It’s not bulking up your file cabinet like excess paper is. Back to you with more soon!
Excellent points. I really need to get on this. Especially since I am sure you are correct that no one will want to carry on after I am gone. They wouldn’t know what to do with the paperwork.
Thanks
I have a friend who inherited 40 huge boxes and 4 4-drawer file cabinets full of genealogy documents from her mom. For years now, she has been sorting through her mom’s work. She is grateful for the data–just wishes it had been handed over on a removable hard drive–not paper enough to require a full room in my friend’s house. But most kids would have created a bonfire, unfortunately. Let us know what you encounter as you start thinking about a digital revolution at your house!
Thanks, Cheryl. I think the do-over concept is brilliant, and I’m doing over, too. Good luck with the decisions ahead! Let me know if I can help.
Good article, very timely. I am just starting a genealogy “Do Over” (per Thomas MacEntee) so I am at a crossroads with a number of choices to be made besides just the Paper Question. But what i’ve been reading here and there online (and is also borne out by this post of yours) and by the Zotero book too is that these things are indeed DOABLE. As you describe, there is a whole heckuva lot of work involved, but the rewards are golden. Looking forward to future postings. Thank you.
Donna, you have given me lots to think about! Not that I have lots of paper, but I do have tons of photos that need scanning – but it is such a daunting project!
Also, I didn’t know you ever lived in Southern CA! During that 1994 Earthquake we lived near Palmdale and it shook us up really good! My husband worked for Los Angeles Unified School District as a welder in the Maintenance Department and he couldn’t travel the 14 freeway since it fell so he had to take Angeles Crest Highway and work tons of overtime due to all the damage to the schools.
NO kidding! I was there for four years, and it finally tilted the scales for me to move back to Alabama. It threw me out of bed that morning. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I was terrified I’d walk out the door and find myself the only one left alive. And I had just brought a new car, so I pictured it in ruins. But we had no damage in my apartment building. I worked for an attorney from his home on Mulholland Drive, and I do miss that view.
I know what you mean about the photos. It can take forever, but it’s so incredibly important. One great thing, if you want to use Zotero as your album….you can scan the photos to your drive, naming then whatever you like. Then, create folders in Zotero–maybe named for the album they came from, if any. You can drag a whole bunch of photos over to the open folder on Zotero, then hold down the Shift and Control keys before you drop it on the space. It will create links to the photos on your desktop, rather than duplicating the many megabytes of space. Then, one by one, you can do the detail work of who’s in the photo, etc. Something to do while you watch old movies. You have to double-click an image to see it in Zotero–so you can just scan a batch of photos. I’m going to put a request in to allow thumbnails.
Good luck getting started!
Yes, moving away from paper is a good and necessary thing to do for disaster-recovery reasons, but there will be an immediate, everyday pay-off for a researcher, even from the first day of saving-instead-of-printing. It makes analysis so much easier when the document images are on the computer and linked to the genealogy database. I think that this delight will be felt quickly by anyone who just starts by avoiding the printer on new research–instead saving each image from an online source onto disk instead of printing, and linking a source citation in the genealogy database to that image, so retrieving it is just a click away.
Yes, delight is the word. Oh, there’s no paper to be filed at the end of the session (or week or year)! Oh, I don’t have to go to the file cabinet (or stack of unfiled papers) to recheck how this ancestor spelled his name in his signature! Oh, I don’t have to REfile that paper after checking it! Oh, I can do research or compare documents or write about a family without trekking to and from my file cabinets constantly!
I am still scanning letters about the family that older relatives sent me in the 1970s. I’m not inclined to dispose of those after scanning, because they’re sentimental treasures, but it’s so much easier to work with them in electronic form. It’s also a warm pleasure to email an image to a cousin who expresses an interest.
Amen, amen, amen to everything. It is freedom. It is power. It is control. It is value. It is wisdom.
Digital docs are more secure, take up less space and can be more efficiently searched & found. But wait. There’s more! They are more easily shared with other researchers and interested family. I just took delivery of a Czur overhead scanner. I plan to use it to scan bound membership and baptism registers at my family’s home church that go back 100+ years. Lots of name for lots of descendants and local historians!
Isn’t that the truth, Karen. I remember (it seems like just a couple of years ago) when someone asking you to “send me what you have” meant hours at the library photocopying at 10 cents per sheet, then a hefty package to mail–another five or ten dollars.