Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Plans Do You Have To Pass On Your Genealogy Work?

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  What plans, or potential plans, do you have to pass your genealogy work to relatives and/or descendants, or posterity?

2) Tell us about your plans to pass your work on in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Here's mine:

I've been pondering this question for decades...

Initially, my hope was that I could write 17 multi-generational ancestry books (one for me to cover the most recent 5 generations, and one for each 2nd great-grandparent back, say, 10 generations) and publish them, at least as an eBook or in FamilySearch Books.  I did eBooks in 2012 and put them on Scribd for free, which is searchable.  I also did several "Descendants of..." eBooks and they are also on Scribd.  Almost all of the information has not changed since!

But I know that the modern 21st century grandchild will never care about all of that.  They want family stories, they want audio and video, they want to hear about what their grandparents did in their lives.  

So now I've written and published a StoryWorth book and a MyStories book about my life (both with essentially the same content), and both of my daughters have a copy and claim to have read it, but I doubt that the grandchildren have.  Perhaps I should email the text file to them?

In the process of writing my Genea-Musings blog for almost 19 years, and writing over 18,000 blog posts, I have endeavored to write a genealogical sketch, with as much detail as possible based on records and published information, for my direct ancestors, from my parents back through the known 7th great-grandparents (they are on my 52 Ancestors/Relatives Biographies page).  I am not a great writer and those sketches are full of facts but precious few family stories (because there aren't many stories before the great-grandparents).

Now artificial intelligence comes along and the chatbots are excellent in summarizing, describing, and integrating historical and social context into a narrative, especially if it is in a text format.  What's not to like?  I've been trying to write "improved" and "interesting" family biographies based on the sketches, and any other resource I can find, using the AI tools.  Over the last 9 months, I have been (see my list of blog posts in https://www.geneamusings.com/p/artificial-intelligence-posts.html) doing this to pass things along:

• Creating a biography for each ancestor with historical and social context (I've found Claude and Google ContentLM are really good at this).
• Creating poems and song lyrics, and then a song using the lyrics, for each of my close ancestors (I really like Claude and Grok for the poem and the lyrics, and Suno for the song in an MP4 file). 
• Using Google NotebookLM to create an audio overview (in a WAV file) of the ancestor's biography (and have used TurboScribe to provide text from the audio WAV file).  These are often interesting and insightful.

Now the challenge is how to pass all of that on to the younger generation.  I'm terrible at creating videos, but I'm thinking about:

• Gathering photographs and document images of each ancestor in chronological order.
• Making a video recording for each ancestor using my Zoom account to display the photographs while telling the ancestor's story in my voice, perhaps reading the poem and/or playing the audio overview, and/or then playing the song.  Is that overkill?  

Then there is the massive RootsMagic family tree project with over 74,000 profiles at present - how do I pass that on?  I have an Ancestry Member Tree and a MyHeritage family tree that are nearly identical to the RootsMagic tree.  Many of my RootsMagic profiles are matched to the FamilySearch Family Tree, and my ancestors are in WikiTree in some form.  I'm hopeful that my genealogy work and my blog archive will live on for several more decades.

What about the generated genealogy stuff - the digitized family photographs (4 generations worth), digitized home movies (3 generations worth), record documents (~12 generations worth), Christmas family letters (40 years worth), autobiography, my life story books, and my ancestor and descendant eBooks?  I have a FOREVER account and have put quite a bit of those items on that account which should be accessible to my daughters and grandchildren.

What about the 70 linear feet of paper in my genealogy cave stuffed into three-ring binders that I haven't looked at for about 20 years?  Well, I'm thinking bonfire or 1-800-GOT-JUNK.  I don't think any repository will want them and that my descendants won't have any interest in them.   Sad, but true.  It's almost all on the Internet now.

And then - NEW TECHNOLOGY will come along to make some or all of that obsolete.  Holographs, virtual reality, brain implants, and more.

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Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2025/03/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-plans.html

Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

Subscribe to receive a free daily email from Genea-Musings using www.Blogtrottr.com.