Musings on Data

From the NY Times - Sunday, Sept 23, 2012

I will often read newspaper articles about the internet and social media, and yesterday's NY Times front page offered this article about how much electrical power "the cloud" takes. (As with many very long articles, I read until I feel I've gotten the main point and then my eyes glaze over...)

Anyway, as I read this article I thought about how genealogists search and search for any kind of data they can find on their ancestors. A birth, marriage or death certificate, census records, etc. We are fortunate if we can find some more personal information about the person, especially a diary, letters or even a memoir.

Future genealogists will have a much different problem. How will they sort through the mountains of data on each person? I think about all the data I have for myself. I have all the letters that my mom wrote to my grandma during the 1960s, the letters I wrote to my parents when I went to college and in the early years of my marriage before I started using email as well as the letters I wrote to H during those periods where we were apart. I also have saved so many emails. I have this blog. I have scrapbooks and the journals I kept in college. It goes on and on.

Do I think that people will actually care about this in the future? I like to think I will go back through all this old stuff, but really, I probably will look at less than 1% of it all. Maybe it's just comforting to me to know that I can look at my past self should I ever feel the need.

However, I may want to go through it and purge the most embarrassing stuff on the off chance that someone will one day actually go through it.....