How to Preserve Your Family Memories?

A widely discussed topic among genealogy bloggers and other genealogy companies because we know how precious these memories are.

We don’t have all the answers about this topic, so this article will allow us to share our reflections with you. 

Knowing Your Ancestors, Is It Better to Know Yourself? 

We won’t tell you anything new, when you do genealogy, like a detective, you search for the slightest trace of life left by our ancestors. You dig, examine, verify, and what a joy it is to have found a piece of the story of a forgotten great-aunt. 

We inevitably get attached to these people. People we knew, who accompanied us for a few years, or ancestors whose names mean something vague to us, or even nothing at all. The little we know about these people leaves room for our imagination. With a distant cousin who was a cabaret singer, a great-uncle who died in war, or a few mysterious inscriptions on a beam dated over 110 years, one big and true question arises: who were they?

Such a vast question that it’s already a victory to know their birth, marriage, and death dates, their jobs, their places of life… But it goes without saying that this information-hungry research would certainly be satisfied if we could (always) know more. 

Putting a Face to a Name

Here’s how, after searching through archives, we find ourselves searching in an attic. Certainly looking for a clue left there by chance, something physical, as if to assure ourselves of the reality of the existence, one day, of an ancestor. In search of a treasure, a box that would glow in the dark, full of a new vein of documents and images to search through, examine, and verify. 

It’s like bringing these people back to life, without yet being able to confirm their identity or the context of the photo. But how to know, after all? If nothing is written on the back of the photo, if the photo has lost most of its color, and if unfortunately there is no living memory to question. This is THE question, and (except for a miracle) we don’t have the answer.  A few clues could guide these researches on the context and identity of these people, such as the print and support of the photo, then the clothing style, hairstyles, poses… symbols marking a specific era.

Playing the Archivist 

Common sense and the “collector” spirit quickly push us to digitize, frame, or store these treasures in boxes to preserve them from time and keep a trace. With a little experience, we can even venture into photo editing (colors, contrast, and sharpness), but be careful not to damage them even more! And then, what to keep first? These images, documents, or objects belong to us only by inheritance. The question behind all this is what to pass on next? The photos, recipes, valuable jewelry, films, notebooks, letters… all that would allow us to better know the tastes and life of an almost unknown ancestor, perhaps?

And Future Generations ?

All these questions about the physical memories left by our ancestors push us to wonder what we will leave, consciously or not. At a time when digital is omnipresent, our traces are much more numerous and much easier to track and preserve. And yes, Instagram is the new dusty photo album too often forgotten in the library - the one we open 1 or 2 times a year, as a family, and in which we immerse ourselves for hours... When our great-great-grandchildren won’t even have to go up to the attic or open an album, but will just have to type our name into Google… what will we have left? This question certainly makes you think!

Archives are the pros of preservation. Some offer a few tips:

How to Preserve Your Archives? - Departmental Archives of the Ardennes

How to Preserve My Archives? - Departmental Archives of Aisne

How to Prepare Your Documents Before Digitizing Them? - Departmental Archives of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence

You and Your Archives - City of Reims