Preserve Your Information - Keep It Safe

Photocopies - Transcriptions - Scans - Photograph

Preserve your information with the help provided here on how to do it. If you don't, you may lose everything you have done up to now, and face having to start all over again!

You need to preserve your genealogy information - saving family history records for yourself as soon as you have found relevant information of any kind in any place.

If you merely enter the information into your program, and do not make a copy of the document you have found, you will likely regret it later.

This means saving the information exactly as you find.

It is far easier to save your information as a step when you find the information than it is to find the source again later when you have need for that copy. This is especially true if you have traveled to a location far from home to do this particular genealogy research.

No matter which method you use to make a copy to take home with you, a very critical step is the plan to source the document you have found. Sourcing is a whole topic on its own.

What is important to you here is to figure exactly how you will permanently attach the source information to your copy when you make the copy - not after you get home!

Methods to Preserve Your Information

Following are links to several ways to preserve your information from their source so you take a copy away with you when you leave. You can then file that copy with your other genealogy materials.

Consider the following to be only some methods to preserve your family history data. I am sure there are those among you who can come up with other ways to accomplish this as well.

• Audio record it from the fiche, film, or paper copy.
• Photocopy it from the paper copy.
• Photograph it from the paper copy, negative, or slide.
• Print it from the microfiche or microfilm machine.
• Scan it from the paper copy.
• Transcribe it from the fiche, film, or paper copy.
• Videotape it from the paper copy.

You will have to decide what is the best way to preserve your information under each different set of circumstances.

In some cases, you will be very restricted in doing anything. You may not even be allowed to touch the paper copies of old materials, and so you may not be able to take it to a photocopy machine or scanner.

You might be allowed to take a picture of it with a digital camera or video camera, but you may have to do so without any flash or lights.

Sometimes your choices will be limited to audio recording or transcribing. In this case, remember you are either reading or writing the information from the original or fiche or film copy, which gives room for error to creep in. If you do not pay very close attention, it is easy to make an error in transcribing the material which could materially alter the meaning of the article.

The most important thing is to leave the repository with copies of all the related genealogy documents you have found.

Make it a habit to plan ahead to preserve your information as you find it, and leave home prepared for all eventualities.

This means packing all the equipment you have that you might need while you are at this particular repository, or on this particular genealogy hunting trip, including micro cassette recorder and tapes for it; video camera and tapes or discs; analog camera and film; digital camera and memory cards; pen or hand-held scanner; paper and pens; and your notebook computer (and all its add-ons you may need).

Preserve Your Information Now - It May Be Your Only Chance