Online or print?

My whole purpose for starting genealogy was to digitize all those lovely records and information Mom had acquired over the years while she was the family historian. Once I had them digitized I would be done. Her work would be preserved and life would be normal.

Obviously that isn't exactly how it worked out. Not only is a lot of her work still not digitized, a lot more has been added to it. 

Obviously my first choice with all this fabulous information was to find a way to put it online. Yay! No more printing. No more worrying that I'd have to reprint when new information was found. Oh, the ease of sharing the information.

Online is great. I've found a lot of information and digitized images of important documents.

But. There's that word. You need both, digitized copies and printed copies. 

Why? When we pass, and all of us will. We're not going to live forever. We don't know who will pick up our work or when they'll pick it up to carry on with the family history. 

My mother worked on genealogy before the age of computers in every home and long before the age of the internet. I have reams and reams of papers to go through. 

For the most part, those reams and reams of paper have held up from when Mom stopped and I started. There's a twenty-five to thirty year time span between when she finished and I started. 

What if she'd stopped at the age of the 5.25 or 3.5 floppy disk era? How many of us still have a computer with a floppy disc drive? I don't. 

How long before the used to be "forever" CD goes the way of the 8 track? You don't know what an 8 track is? Exactly my point. Or the cassette? The what? Exactly. 

Today, in 2012 I save my information as a GEDCOM. I save my pictures as a JPEG. I save my stories as a Word or PDF. Well the computers of 2050 be able to read any of those extensions? Chances are very likely, no. 

Do you want to do all this work, leave it to your family, a genealogy or historical society and run the risk of them not doing anything with it until the format you used is obsolete and all they have is a lovely coaster to set their iced tea on so they don't water stain their desk? That's not my goal.

Does that mean you shouldn't save it electronically? Don't be dense. Of course you should. That's the world we live in today. We do everything electronically. It's fast. It's cheap. It's the best way to transfer information from point A to point B. Today it's the best way.

Twenty or thirty years from now all of this will probably be improved, making our best way today obsolete in the future. 

But a great backup plan is to have printed copies of everything. Print them on acid free paper and place them in acid free protectors. Distribute copies to various family members so if your house burns, someone else has a copy. Or if your area floods, there's another copy around.

With laser printers, acid free paper, acid free protectors, our printed documents can last for decades if not centuries. It won't matter what type of electronic gadgets a person has in 2050 or in 2150. They will still read the written word that's been printed on paper. 

Use both, online and print. You won't be sorry. And those descendants of yours who find your work in 2150 will be grateful that you thought of them as you preserved the information.