It’s Preservation Week: Preserving Your Family’s Heritage

What are you doing for Preservation Week? It’s an important question for genealogists and family historians, whose mission is to preserve their family’s heritage. Here’s a chance to take action!

The American Library Association launched Preservation Week in 2010 out of a concern that “our cultural and information heritage…continues to be at risk.” The goal of this week, April 27-May 3, is “preserving and collecting personal, family, or community heritage.” You can see it on the ALA website Preservation Week: Pass It On!

The ALA’s efforts focus on our tangible heritage – documents, photos, artifacts, and digital collections of records. That’s good! But what about your family’s intangibles, the family stories and lore? Here are some things you should be doing right now:

• Interview family elders while you still can to preserve their memories.

• Preserve your own memories. Too many family historians get caught up in researching their ancestors and forget to preserves their own life stories, the events for which they are the primary source.

• Take some action to preserve your genealogy research, family photo collections, and documents.

If you are thinking about creating a family history book, that’s a great way to preserve your family’s heritage. There are some good options for digital preservation, but don’t  ignore less high tech solutions. Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley advises, “ … consider paper as an archival medium.”  A beautiful family history book is an elegant way to preserve your family’s heritage.