Bequeathing Your Digital Files

When I was 50, which is a long time ago now, I wrote my Will. What I left out of it was my computer files because I didn't have a computer then. When I did, it still didn't occur to me for quite awhile how to deal with them. Over the years I left README files here and there and I was religious about computer backups but one day I had a feeling I was missing something. 

On my computer, two-thirds of my 550 GB and 99% of my effort are family history files so they were mostly what caught my attention. I had done years of work, gleefully spreading out this way and that and lost track of where it was all going. 

You may think you know your way around your computer files, and you might be right. But does anyone else? 

I'm not going through the whole thing about regular backups; any combination of cloud services and external hard-drives, multiple copies, staggered by date. You've heard it all before. And certainly from me, ad nauseam over many years. Just do it. 

I do want to mention one other thing. If you don't have a plan for your family history work, chances are it's not going to survive. In your whole household of belongings for someone else to deal with, how do you think your measly hard-drive is going to rank? 

The older you get the more pressing this feels but don't wait to get old to feel pressed. 

Make your wishes known.

This is what I suggest. It doesn't matter if you're at the beginning of your journey, in the middle or at the end. It doesn't matter if you're confused and totally overwhelmed by files and photos and naming conventions and all those sticks in the forest. Your level of disarray doesn't matter. Take one day to do this and then you can go back to the other stuff.

Make a folder called ARCHIVES. This is going to contain everything you want passed on when you're gone. Then go through all your files and move those items, files or entire folders, into it. This will take you miles toward having a plan. Don't destroy any useful folder structure you already have. That is not the point of this. 

Go through everything. It will take you as long as it takes you to make your decisions. It's as simple as it can possibly be. Either you want to leave a file to someone, or you don't.  

I don't use the Music, Pictures or Videos folders on my desktop. It just spreads files around for no good reason. 

This is my setup under Documents.

FINANCES, PA & PERSONAL will be needed by my executor. And then erased as per my instructions. 

Under my ARCHIVES:

 

I'm not suggesting you replicate these folders. I'm just showing you mine as an example. This is a stable structure but it doesn't mean it's the end of my road. I keep doing whatever I do, backing up daily and weekly as I go. 

The other thing you need to decide is who you're giving it to. Make a list with their names and contact information. Not all the files under my ARCHIVES are going to everyone. This is specified in a note to my executor. 

I've gone an extra mile in setting up a backup drive for each person on my list. There's only five. If you want to be nice to your executor you can also do this. These are backed up weekly to catch any changes. Syncback can help you micro-manage your backups.

I don't keep files in the Cloud but it's the same process, just a URL instead of a drive. Have them sent when you're gone or do it now. 

Do something else. Go around your house with a clipboard and take note of books, binders, file-boxes, papers, etc. that are part of your family history and make a list. Decide where you want it to go. Leave this with instructions for your executor. Anything you can do to facilitate the process of getting your wishes complied with, do it.

There's other things I could heap on your shoulders, like scanning every piece of genealogical paper you've got, giving it to historical societies and uploading it to online trees but this is not the place for it. If you can get as far as making an ARCHIVES folder and deciding on somewhere to send it, anyone who loves the gift will have a place to work from. 

OCR Historical Documents

You may have noticed many of the old books scanned by Google Books and elsewhere have been scanned as images.

If you want to extract text from them, you have to re-type the text line by line. This is extremely hard on your eyes, not to mention your time.

BUT, there's a way around this. NAPS2 can turn the original images back into text and it's very easy to do. This is called OCR. (Optical Character Recognition). It also makes the text searchable. This is a huge boon when you have a book hundreds of pages long and you're looking for something specific.

Step 1. Download and install NAPS2. It's open source and free for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Step 2. Make sure the OCR options are turned on. 

 

Step 3. Import (browse to your PDF location) and Open and wait for all the pages to load.

Step 4. If you only want to OCR one page, select that image and click Save PDF. When that's finished and you open your PDF you will be able to select and then copy and paste the text. If you want more pages or the whole document, it's the same process, just longer.

This is the original image, followed by the OCRed text. In this case, dead accurate. This may not always be the case depending on how clear or not clear the type is. And you may have to adjust line breaks depending where you're copying to. Considering the options this is a small matter.

 

"forge in the early part of 1800, and another distillery in 1811.
They carried on an extensive business. The firm was dissolved
in 1826. Mr. Slocum was Justice of the Peace in 1821 of the
district which included the present Pittston, Providence and Exeter townships. He was successful in business and accumulated
in addition to other property, 1,800 acres of land, all located
within the present limits of Scranton, and nearly all of it was
underlaid with coal. He left thirteen children, nine sons and
four daughters.
V.—Mary, b. 22 Dec. 1768; m. Joseph Towne, a farmer; resided
in Ohio near Circleville; d. 5 April, 1844. Left several children."

What I love even more about what NAPS2 can do is working with obituaries. I can't even tell you how many newspaper obits I've re-typed by hand. Thousands? In NAPS2, import the image and then save it as a PDF. Open the PDF and select the text and copy it where you want to. This obit scrolls on and on but this is just the first paragraph. Tiny errors in it. Obviously, it's easier to look through and make small adjustments than type the entire thing word by word.

 

 

"FORMER CITY
ATTORNEY DIES
AT W. PITTSTON
Jordan Howard Rockefeller,
Esq., practicing attorney in this
citv a half century ago, died of a
sudden heart attack at 7:30 o'clock
this morning in the home of his
<on. Jordan H. Rockefeller, Jr., at West Pittston, where he resided
for the past ten years. He was 80 years of age."

Of course, if you're starting at scanning a document, that's what NAPS2 is for. 

Some History

When I first started collecting family history files, the first thing I tried to do was sort them by individuals or married couples. My next instinct was to nest them but I couldn't see a way to make that happen. I was onto something but it wasn't making sense yet.

I filed the idea in the back of my mind and looked around at what other people were doing; sorting by records types mostly but I couldn't see how it would work. How would I find records for a particular person or family group which I, or others, would be most interested in?

It took some time to discover what I intuitively knew at the beginning and now seems obvious to me; a filing system that reflects the family structure of the database. When I read about an MRIN-based filing system for paper by Karen Clifford I realized that was the key to it and went back to my initial idea of nesting folders on my computer.

When I first wrote about it on my blog in 2006, someone(s) started publicly spreading bad press that MRINs are not stable in the database. This, according to Legacy's tech support, could be true, in a manner of speaking, if you were using the free version (I think it was v.5 at that time) because they could sometimes need to compact the MRINs when they were fixing something else. I used the paid version and never had a problem myself. But people persisted with the more common storage arrangements. 

Nowadays this is no longer an issue because there's no longer a paid vs. free version. There's only one full version of Legacy 10 and it's free for everyone.

Some people started adding Windows File Properties to their filing systems based on records, locations or names. It took a lot of years of me talking about standardized metadata and trying to wean people off using WFP for alternatives to start showing up in other peoples' blogs.

When I perused my many JLOG blog posts (2006-2016) I realized this filing system was the only thing I'd written about that was worth keeping so I sat down for a few months and compiled a book out of everything I knew. Then I ran into a couple of things I'd missed and sat some more til I figured them out.

I published the book in 2019. In 2023 I looked through it all again to update broken links and make some small changes to the text where applicable.

So, it's all trickled down to here.