Updated my 52 Ancestors and Amanuensis Monday Lists Today. How Can I Preserve Them?

As devoted Genea-Musings readers know, I write a weekly blog post with an ancestor's biography for the 52 Ancestors blog challenge every Friday morning and a weekly blog post for an ancestor's record transcription for the Amanuensis Monday blog challenge every Monday morning.  

I updated my Pages with lists of these posts today.  There are now 361 biographies on the 52 Ancestors Biographies page, and about 540 record transcriptions on the Amanuensis Monday page.

These are essential parts of my weekly genealogy research and documentation activities because they advance my knowledge of my ancestors' lives and the records created for my ancestors.  I subscribe to the "Seaver Chunk Theory of Genealogy Progress" which says "do something every day, every week, every month, every year to advance the state of your genealogy knowledge and pretty soon you have a mountain of research."  

The problem with the "mountain" is "how do you save it for posterity?"  

I have 14,250+ posts in almost 15 years on this blog now - a true mountain of genealogy research.  These posts are a major part of my "Body of Work."

Those posts include more personal research, such as the "Surname Saturday," "Seavers in the News", "Tombstone Tuesday" and "Wordless Wednesday" posts.  In addition, there are the weekly curation posts for Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org new and updated collections, the weekly "Best of the Genea-Blogs" posts, plus the semi-weekly "Genealogy News and Education Bytes" posts.  Then there are the occasional "Dear Randy" posts and weekly "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun" posts.  

I post all of these in order to share information with my readers and anyone else that finds these blog posts by doing an Internet search, or by browsing my blog using ancestor names and locations.  

From a posterity standpoint, the most important posts are the family photographs in the Wordless Wednesday series, the biographies in the 52 Ancestors series, and the transcriptions in the Amanuensis Monday series.

I have been thinking a lot about how to save these blog posts for posterity (or at least for my descendants) and the genealogy world.  I have not written ebooks or published books like several of my friends who memorialize their blog each year, and that seems like a daunting and expensive task at this point in time.  I occasionally create ebooks in PDF format and put them on Scribd.com  (see https://www.scribd.com/user/43095920/Randy-Seaver) so that search engines can find them.  But those are 8 years old now and I have more information!  I'm working on updating them and adding more.

My online family trees at Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and Findmypast.com  are updated occasionally (yearly?), and include my genealogy research, including General and Fact Notes, in the RootsMagic family tree genealogy software program, but Ancestry doesn't show General Notes to other users. I could add my daughters, or cousins, to my Ancestry account so that they can access and add to or edit the tree data.

I have been adding the 52 Ancestors biography and Amanuensis Monday transcribed information to Notes in RootsMagic, and then transferring the notes to person profiles for my ancestors in FamilySearch Family Tree.  This works well, but the Notes can be edited or deleted by another researcher.

I am keenly aware that Google and Blogger will not save my "chunks of stuff" forever, and could kill my website at any time.  They probably will kill it one or more years after I die and stop using the website.  So what can or should I do with the "chunks" I think have value to my family and to other researchers?

You might ask - what is your plan?  Here are some of what I want to do or am doing:

*  I will use genealogy software to create updated ebooks of my ancestry, my wife's ancestry, and descendants of key families (e.g., Seaver, Carringer, Auble, Vaux, Dill, Buck) and put them on Scribd.  These will probably not include Notes because of the high page count of the books, but will include sources (such as they are at the time of creation).

*  I will use genealogy software to create an ebook of my ancestry and my wife's ancestry back to 2nd great-grandparents with all of the Notes and sources that includes family stories and photographs.  I might even self-publish a few copies for my daughters and grandchildren.

*  I will inquire if I can donate these ebooks to FamilySearch Books or the Internet Archive so that other researchers can benefit from my research.

*   I will make PDFs of the 52 Ancestor biography posts and the Amanuensis Monday transcription posts and attach them as Stories to my Ancestry and other online trees.  

*  I will add my daughters to my FOREVER account (which should last 98 more years).

*  I have started creating photo albums on FOREVER for each family.  I have over 50 8-mm home movies already in my FOREVER account.  

*  I have started creating presentations of family photos for my family, my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and will put those on my YouTube channel and my FOREVER account.  

*  I will put those PDFs of important blog posts in my FOREVER account as documents.

*  I will put my RootsMagic file, and a GEDCOM file, in my FOREVER account. 

Whew - if I quit blogging, I could probably get all of that done in two to three years.  My plans are always bigger than the time available!

What provisions have you made for your blog posts, your genealogy research, your photo collection, your online trees, and all of your paper and digital records?

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