Imagine

For a minute, pretend that you are a census taker. Your job is to go around to your neighbors and ask them questions. As they give you answers you type their responses into your laptop. From sun up to sun down, you're out there with your laptop, enumerating all those in your district.

You feel good about your job. After all, by getting an accurate number of people in each township, you know that life will be good when all the gerry-mandering starts...I mean the redistricting. By making sure every person in your district is accounted for, your area will get their fair share of income redistribution...I mean fair share of Federal tax money for all the projects most people in your district didn't know they wanted...err, I mean needed.

See how easy it is to take something like the Federal Census and turn it into something political. That is not what I want to do. I do hope the humor there was obvious. Each person views the census and census taker completely different.

However, let's go back to our current day census taker with his/her laptop.

And imagine.

Imagine 150 years from now your dusty laptop is pulled out of a storage closest with all that wonderful data on it. They turn it on and they can see all the information that was collected 150 years ago. Right? I doubt it. A computer from 20 years ago isn't much good today. Files from 20 years ago are for most people unreadable with today's software. So, 150 years from now, what's on my computer or your computer today is pretty useless.

Yet...today I've spent most of the day reading documents that contain data that was collected over 200 years ago. I didn't read the original document, but I read an image of the original document.

The census taker in 1810 went from house to house, either on foot or horse and or buggy. Maybe a mule. He, yes it was a he, she's were not census takers in 1810, carried a supply of quill pens with him and a bottle of ink, plus plenty of paper. The names and hash marks he made in 1810 are readable today. Well, for the most part they are. Some haven't held up well over the last 200 years. Some have names that are very hard to read due to water damage or the name is at the top or bottom of the page or near the crease and the ink shows wear and tear. But overall, most of them are over 99% readable. I'm not talking one or two documents. I'm talking hundreds of pages of documents are still readable today. If I were where the original documents were kept I wouldn't need any special equipment to read them. Just my eyes and my hands to turn the pages.

As I read the 1810 census I wondered if the guy who wrote all those names and made all those hash marks could even imagine that in 2012 someone would be reading his writing, searching for information. I doubt it.

I'm sure he was only doing his job so redistricting was based on accurate numbers. And in those days, the federal government didn't have anything called an income tax to give back to us. So even that aspect of it was lost on him.

Would he shake his head in wonder that so many of us are looking for clues about our ancestors from over 200 years ago? Probably.

Imagine for a minute that you were he.

Now ask yourself, what types of things do you have that have the potential to be found and usable in 200 years?

Imagine...something of yours lasting that long.