Bequeathing Your Online Files

Perhaps I should have named "Bequeathing Your Digital Files" as "Bequeathing Your Computer Files" because that was what I was actually talking about. In an age when a lot of people only use smartphones and keep files online, the post was insufficient so here's another one.  

Bequeathing digital files means, according to Google Search, options for bequeathing your online accounts. I have almost none that aren't immediately dispensable when I'm gone so I don't know much about that but you can investigate individual sites on your own. I'll give you a couple of examples below.

I don't use any social media or keep files online. Old-fashioned of me, but I know where my files are. They're on my computer and backed up to physical drives. 

But I also have DNA accounts chock full of useful information. First, I just left other people the logins for my accounts in notes they will receive after my death. Good enough, right? Maybe not. 

This is what FamilyTreeDNA has set up as a way to handle this. I would suggest in addition to leaving notes with logins. If this is already written into your Will that's good too.

https://blog.familytreedna.com/verify-account-settings-kit-manager-beneficiary-contact-information/ 

It's a very simple thing to do. It will take you 5 minutes per account if you don't dawdle. Click on Account Settings, then Beneficiary, put in the person's name and email address, phone optional. Then inform the person you've chosen. There's also an option to print a legal version of this to be signed by a Notary Public. Overkill in my opinion but it's there if you want it. 

I don't know if any of the other DNA sites have anything set up. I looked but couldn't find anything on them except a 2017 blog post that said they didn't. As far as the trees themselves, probably yes but you'd have to look around in the Settings for a way to choose a beneficiary and you probably should.

Some of my funniest, most charming and helpful DNA matches up and died before we had time to figure out how we were related. They're gone from the database now which means they probably did appoint beneficiaries but the beneficiaries decided to delete their accounts instead of carrying on. You can't control everything. There's plenty of time and plenty of more mysteries.  

I've never been in a position of having my life on a smartphone but I did once order a USB key, thinking I was just getting a USB key, but it was obviously built for smartphone division of files, so I think people do back up their phone files to physical drives and that's a good thing. 

The main thing is you don't want to be in a position where you have files that are ONLY online. Or ONLY on your phone in case it crashes. I don't know. Do phones suddenly crash and disappear your files? I've never had the pleasure. 

As long as you have your files on a physical drive (preferably more than one) and are not dependent on online storage, you're still in control. 

If your executor has your passwords, why would any online service know you're deceased? I don't think they would except in the case of, say, banks because your finances get shut down as soon as they've got a death certificate. 

As long as someone else has the logins, and your phone for those irritating confirmation numbers sent by text, they should be able to get into your accounts from anywhere, as people do. The big question is, For how long? Here's an article that talks about email accounts:

What Happens to a Deceased Person's Email Account? Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook Explained 

Here's an important part. Have a password manager. I've used KeePass for many years. My executor will have the master password to get into it. 

I know some people scribble down passwords on a sheet of paper. Sometimes someone's asked me for help with something over the phone. And as we're going along I say, Log in to your account. And they say, Password? Hmm, password? And I say, Yeah, password. And I hear them shuffling around in a pile of papers. Unless you're very well organized with an indestructible password notebook, I wouldn't recommend it. 

I realize sorting out what you're leaving to whom can be hard decisions to make but decide where you stand and then do whatever it takes. I lived pre-digital for much longer than I've been living in it so perhaps it's simpler for me to know where my borderlines are. I don't think all the people in my life have the right, or time, to know about what goes on with everyone else in my life. Not in life, not in death either. So I haven't shovelled it all up to some online site hoping for the best.

On the other hand, it's not a bad option to do some of that too. If you need more inspiration, this would be the place to interject a horror story I heard. I don't know if it was online so forgive me. A man who was ill was in hospital expected to die. The family, who couldn't stand his lifelong genealogy habit, emptied his entire house of books and papers into a dumpster because they were so anxious to be rid of them. And then, of course, punch-line --- he survived.  

You're still here. You get to have a say.  

Stories

About 15 years or 20 years ago I started writing what turned out to be an unintentional book. 

I hadn't found all the ancestors I wanted to find yet, but I had gained a reputation around the family for collecting old photos and instead of throwing them away, people sent them to me. I scanned all the photos and slides starting with the birth of my older sister and ending at the year we had all gone our separate ways and were no longer a family as we'd been. There was no single place we were all coming home to anymore. That covered 27 years. 

I split the mishmash of 8mm movie clips that had been transposed to DVD into shorter segments and dated them. I cropped and color-corrected all the photos. The slides had to be professionally cleaned because I couldn't do it at home without dying from the inhalation of alcohol fumes. I scanned and dated all of those because thankfully someone had put dates on them in pencil. Then I split the whole works into folders by year and then I moved them around and renamed them individually so the story line was in order. 

In some cases the pencil dates were wrong because a photo that belonged to a certain story line was attached to the wrong year. But with time and persistence, eventually I had it lined up pretty well.

At that point I went back to the pesky missing ancestors and got obsessed with DNA. A totally different story. 

When I came back to the photos and movie clips I realized no-one in the future was going to understand this without captions. So I set my sights on putting captions on each photo and a simple text document to catalogue the movie clips. I might have been 5 minutes into this when I realized it was a really bad idea. What I thought I should do instead, and started to do, was create a document for each year and write a brief description of a whole year at a time, 27 times, using the pictures as memory triggers.  

I thought that would be a fairly efficient approach and I'd be done in no time. 

Of course I couldn't stop there because what was most interesting to me about the stories was what was going on behind the camera, not what was in front of it. Who cares about "4 girls sitting in the living room in November"? 

I convinced myself it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lot of imagery without an explanation of, "What in the world was going on there?" This was clearly demonstrated to me by an acquaintance who was looking through an album one day, back when I had albums ...  which can be a really boring thing to do, looking at other people's pictures when you don't know any of the people involved. He turned a page, turned to the previous page, turned forward and then back again several times and said, Happy kid, then sad kid, what happened here? He really wanted to know.

By now each folder of photos and videos has a document called [Year] The Story. I work in outline form in ActionOutline and when I make additions or changes to a year, I save it as RTF and overwrite it in the appropriate folder. If I print the entire thing now it's 132 pages including a brief intro of Mom and Dad at the top, how they met, married, where they lived and how they imagined their future before it launches into the kid pics and the reality of watching it all play out. 

As I've written I've gone further and further into the labyrinth. At times I've felt in a hurry to finish it because, you know, the past is the past. At times I've taken breaks from it for months. And then a memory pulls me back looking for the right words. 

It's my book; I get to write it any way I want it. Sometimes I draw pictures. Sometimes I write short vignettes as sub-items. I found the first house I lived in on Google Maps. The surprising thing about this is that the Google Street View car had been down that street for the first time ever only one month before I went looking for the house and that was last year. I could see it from 3 sides close up and zoom in on the side of the back porch. Although I couldn't see the back door I imagined my father walking through it. I checked out the whole neighbourhood like it was yesterday on my tricycle. I wasn't supposed to leave the yard but I used to go all the way to the end of our block and back.  

The way the years are set up to save and re-save by overwriting, it's an endless book. Like Margaret Atwood said, "It's just between you and the wastebasket." Perspectives change. It will stop when I stop. Sometimes the stories take off into strange lands and serve the job of a psychiatrist and there I am seared to my core seeing myself reflected back through the words that come out of me. The past is oftentimes nowhere near as past as we think it is. You may or may not want to do this to yourself. 

Estates

I'm used to looking at old Wills. I particularly like the ones where all the person's possessions are listed on one page. They lived before shopping centers. Property lines were written as extending to so-and-so's fence line. No GPS. 

I don't know this for a fact but I'm guessing the reason people wrote their Wills on one page was because all their worldly possession could fit on one page. 

This is not exactly relevant to filing historical documents but it's interesting to note the difference between past and present. I only mention this because a cousin is presently dealing with her mother's estate where she listed all her worldly possessions, down to the nails holding coffee cups on the wall, as a codicil to her Will. In other words, a binding legal document. 

Oh.My.GOD.

And, of course, the lawyers won't let it go. And she's been up til 1 o'clock multiple mornings creating a spreadsheet for them. 

There's a big difference between a compact listing of 1 pitchfork, 1 basket, 1 horse, 1 cow and calf, 1 plough, potatoes in the field, 1 iron kettle, 1 bed and bed clothing, 2 slaves ... and 6,000 items from your favourite mall and London Drugs. 

As far as I could tell from listening to this on the phone there are 3 items of enduring value; two paintings and a wedding ring. This is happening in British Columbia so there are other household categories for probate; furniture, clothing, and electronics at Fair Market Value.

I'm not a legal scholar so I work from common sense if I can. 

I wrote a Will a long time ago. I haven't changed it since. It covers where my money goes. Full stop. 

And then there's my household full of 21st century possessions, just the regular stuff everyone has; linens, clothes, kitchen utensils, ubiquitous plastic. This is not part of my Will. Because some of it changes. I break things. I send things to recycling. I don't need the trouble of writing a new Will every time I go shopping. 

I don't have a single thing that would increase in market value over time; jewellery, rare manuscripts, antiques, coin or stamp collections. What I have for my Executor is a list. I wrote it as a map in case he was looking for something in particular. To save him the bother of having to look everywhere.

After listening to my cousin and doing a little research I realized I needed to put an asterisk next to things that need to be included for probate. Most of it doesn't. 

I have another document that says where I want particular items sent to. Not much but a few things of possible value to others. Like genealogy files on external hard-drives and a 70-year old sewing machine that still runs and still repairs my clothes and a few paper files (too many actually). 

What I'm saying is if you don't need to complicate your life with a codicil listing of everything in your bathroom cabinet, don't. This is not legal advice so check the requirements of your specific locality.