by James Wallace Harris, 11/20/23
I currently have 71,882 files in Dropbox. Will anyone want any of those digital documents after I die?
Let’s say I go on a Döstädning rampage (Swedish death cleaning) of my digital possessions, would there be anything left that I’d want anyone to have?
Most people consider their photographs to be among their most cherished digital possessions. I have 5,368 of those — some of those photos go back to four generations in our families. Susan and I have no children. We made copies of those photos for our relatives one Christmas, although I’m not sure if any of those relatives wanted them. I imagine them groaning at their pile of digital junk growing larger.
Would a genealogical database want old photographs? I know people interested in their ancestry spend a lot of time looking for old documents online. I wonder if I have any photos, letters, or documents that would be of interest to people in the future researching their past?
I have 28,811 digital scans of old science fiction and pulp magazines that took me years to collect. Most of them are easily found online, so I doubt they will be wanted. But what if the Internet Archive servers were shut down for lack of funding? Will there be kids in the future wishing they had a complete run of Astounding Science Fiction? Or will that desire die with the generation that grew up reading the stories that were first published in that magazine?
There are certain documents relating to money that my wife will want, but she will prefer printed copies. When my mother died, and Susan’s folks died, I scanned a bunch of family documents. I haven’t looked at them in years, and Susan has never asked about them. Still, would they be of value to anyone? What will future historians want to know about ordinary people?
I wonder how long my blogs will exist after I die. I’ve known bloggers who have died, and I can still read their blog posts, but some of writers were published at online companies that went under. I know I used a couple of those sites, and I can’t even remember the names of the companies.
I have over a thousand Kindle books, and over a thousand Audible audiobooks in Amazon’s cloud. Is there any way for me to leave those libraries to other people?
And if no one in the future will want my digital files, do I need to hang onto them now? Why do I keep them? Why do I give Dropbox $119 a year? When I retired, I made copies of all the computer programs I wrote. I put them on several drives just to be sure. I put those drives in the closet. Several years later I went to check on them and every one of those hard drives was dead. I have a friend whose computer hard drive died recently. She had always backed everything up with Apple’s Time Machine. However, when she restored her files, many were corrupted. It’s hard to preserve digital files for a long time. Backup programs and online backup services aren’t 100% reliable.
When humanity stored our past on paper, some of it got saved. Not much, but some. I get the feeling that since we switched to storing stuff digitally, even less will survive. I have a handful of paper photographs that my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents took. So does Susan. I wonder who we should give them to?
Every day I spend a few minutes going around the house looking for things to throw away or give away. I need to start doing that with my computer files. I spent a lifetime gathering stuff, both physical stuff, and digital stuff. It’s funny now that I’m trying to reverse that progression of acquisitions.
I wonder when I was young if I had somehow known for sure that my older self would be getting rid of all the stuff I was buying back then, would I have bought so much stuff in the first place? How much stuff have I bought or saved because of FOMO (fear of missing out)? And how much did I really miss out?
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
My brother and I just went through my parents’ picture albums. I think there were over 35 of them. We pulled the pics that included them with our immediate family,…children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The rest were of their friends and the many places around the world they travelled to as a group, or by themselves. Quite the trove. However except for a very view ‘special’ pics the rest went into the (gulp!) garbage.
For other things, my parents have a number of unique pieces of furniture like my great grandfathers writing desk handed down to them. My brother and I plan on retaining about 5 or 6 of the very unique pieces, after which it will be up to our children to decide when their turn comes.
As for online, I plan to provide my kids with the passwords to my files and they can spend the time or not to skim through and save or throw out the hard drive and access to google one drive as they see fit.
I’m a hobby genealogist, and my oldest son shares a similar interest so in that respect the many artifacts, including pictures I have accumulated over the years, may get passed along.
Do the genealogical sites you use want old photos?
“Would genealogical databases want old photographs?”
Yes! When I was looking for close relatives I opened a couple of genealogy accounts. When I could find even so much as a name, it was rewarding. Name with birthdate, place of birth, etc, exciting! If you were to do this you would have the satisfaction of placing the information in “long-term storage” plus you could be giving a gift to some future ancestry seeker.
My kid will have access to financial accounts when I die but honestly I can’t imagine him bothering to browse anything else. Data I keep is just for me to use in day to day life, then it will (internet-style) die with me. As for photos — like you, I was surprised to discover when I did a huge purging and sorting project, no one was interested in having any of the old photos. So I whittled down thousands of physical photos to a few hundred that are in a couple of old timey (meaning, 1990’s) albums … with every photo marked with date & names. Maybe someone will find them a source of interest when I’m gone.
I think because of the internet young people take for granted the ability to find anything they’re interested in and maybe that’s ok for them. But this temporarily threw me for a loop: I joked to my kid “you should be glad I’m doing this photo project – when my mom died she just left it all for me to deal with.” His response:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and
“I don’t mind if you leave it for me, I’ll just throw it in the garbage.”
Wow, brutally honest! And no he wasn’t joking but it did make me laugh when I realized how shocked my face must’ve looked. 😳 His casual attitude was a good reminder that we all differ in what we judge to be valuable or important.
Do you know of a place to upload old photos?
When my mother told me about the stuff she was saving for me, I didn’t say anything. But after she died, I got rid of most of it. I liked the photos and kept them. But I didn’t want her possessions. My sister took some, but I don’t know if she kept them.
Ancestry.com has been around for ages and they have tons of stuff others have already downloaded. There are other sites, but I’d go with Ancestry because they have the largest data base. Still, you’ll want to just research family tree sites and have a look; you might decide one of the others suits you better.
At Ancestry you’ll need to have an account, so you can create a family tree for yourself. My tree has little detail on it but it’s worked fine for my purposes. I’m sure that even with a simple family tree it wouldn’t be hard to place people on your tree. Then as far as uploading the old photos, I’ve never done that myself but here’s a link to Ancestry’s help page for media:
https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Uploading-Photos-or-Documents?language=en_US
Sorry, no idea how to make the link look better.
I hope you give it a try, it’s actually interesting once you start poking around. Ancestry has records from all over the world, not just in the States. You might find surprises! When I was searching for my natural father I ended up discovering that my only sibling is actually a half-sibling (same mom, different fathers).
We don’t have kids either, but I am a member of the local family history library. At present I’m furiously trying to get each of our family histories into documents that I can lodge at the library for future generations. No doubt my lifetime of photography will go to the dump.
You should check out the r/DataHoarder subreddit. You will likely be able to find people there interested in your file archive. You may also consider uploading your photos to Flickr, many deceased photogs have their works archived there.
Thanks. I’ll check into them. Especially the r/DataHoarder. That sounds like me.
“How much stuff have I bought or saved because of FOMO (fear of missing out)?” I might well ask myself this question. Maybe it’s why I have far more books than I have time to read.
Countless generations can choose to hold on to things, but it only takes one to toss stuff out and remove the choice forever.
Digital files are kind of a funny inversion of neural memory. You have to access/convert/migrate them periodically to ensure they remain valid, but if you frequently recall remembered experiences, the memory itself detaches from reality. (I think you’ve talked about that before, yeah?)