A little while ago I learned that keeping House Deeds is no longer relevant - they are kept online at the land registry.  Worried me a bit, not from legal standpoint but historical, my deeds give lots of interesting insight into the history of my cottage with original entries all handwritten and then advent of typewriters etc.  It occurred to me this weekend that the digital age  could  make all sorts of history in the future very hard for people to research.  Was reading a book in which  one of he plot lines hinged on a hidden document from 1500s.  With our movement towards everything digital and the incredibly fast development of different modes of technology how much of literature, news and everyday life will be accessible to researchers in, say, 500 years time?  OF course, a lot of paperwork documentation can be destroyed or damaged, but  what survives can be read and studied down the years, don't think this will be so for DVDs!  When technology moves on the equipment for reading/showing it becomes obsolete - how many people have a VHS player left, let alone a Betamax, or a cine projector?  In maybe 100/200 years time even if current equipment still exists will the power supply etc still allow it to be played or will there be a very different mode of power?  Maybe history will  almost disappear.

The way we are heading I fear there will be no one left in 500 years time to read it anyway!! It will take just one more world war with an idiot in charge of the big red button and we will all be gone !
Aileen

>When technology moves on the equipment for reading/showing it becomes obsolete

I don't know if you remember the BBC Domesday Project in 1986? That nearly suffered exactly that fate. Basically anything stored digitally shouldn't be considered to be permanent.

It is the same for family photos.  We have a lot of old family photos dating back to great grandparents.    I have photos of my children that I whip out to compare with grandchildren as they reach milestones.    What will my grandchildren be able to show their children I wonder.  All the photos I see of them are on Facebook!  

> We have a lot of old family photos dating back to great grandparents

Please make sure that you put on the back who they are :) :) I've a huge photograph album belonging to my gt.grandmother, dating back to the mid/late 1800s, which has no names at all :(

There is also a major problem today with people not marrying and changing their names (the silly habit of having double-barrel names for example :) ) ) which will make researching family histories so much more difficult in the future :(

Anybody who is at all interested should write down as much of their family history as possible for their descendants - do it 'properly' with a family history programme or just as a project on the laptop. Ask your older relatives what they remember and write it down NOW.  All those children who appear uninterested in their family history when young may suddenly get very interested as they get older :) :) :) And by then it may be too late - I knew none of my grandparents, so missed out on a lot :(

> do it 'properly' with a family history programme or just as a project on the laptop.

And don't forget to print it off!

I have a double barreled name and because I do you can tell what my maiden name was and who I married.
Silly ?

St. Domingo, I read Daisy's post as people NOT marrying but simply adding their partners name to their own without legal record

My Mum still has a Cine camera,projector and screen. She has been going through old pics recently writing on them who the folk are when she knows, her father when her mother died[I was 7] in grief destroyed lots of pics and cine films of us when we lived out in India, Mum had a few but my Gran and Papa kept the largest part of the collection so they were lost for ever.

> I read Daisy's post as people NOT marrying but simply adding their partners name to their own without legal record

Yes and no :) :) This practise can cause many future problems :) If it isn't the 'norm' people in the future won't know what name to look for in records - do people put the man's name first or the woman's ?? What name do the children have ? If they have the double-barrelled name, what will they do when they marry ? Who is using the name - everyone or just the woman ?? Family research was comparitively easy until recently because the conventions were set (more or less) for naming. Now - in some cases - there is no convention, just whatever people choose.  When I was at school, there was a girl on the Honours Board who had a triple-barrelled name - the first and third name being the same ........... :) :)

St Domingo - if I look your marriage up in the records, it will show Mr A marrying Mrs B - it will not show (unless you both gave your new double-barrelled name when you married as your unmarried name) that you are now Mr & Mrs A-B, so researchers, for example, won't look for children with the new name.

It's probably not important to you - only to people, like me, that do family history research :) :)

> And don't forget to print it off!

Yes :) And store it digitally in a current format :)

I also do family research and I don't find it a problem. It is all part of the challenge.

> It is all part of the challenge

:)

And how will people be able to do family research in 100/200/500 years if everything (or most things) are  only stored digitally now?  Not a big worry, obviously, but certainly a concern.  I like continuity, traditions, family and local history, wonder if interest in such things will die out if there is no easy way to access historical fact?

> put on the back who they are :-) :-)

That is what my husband did before his aunt died - we still have a lot of photos without names and I have spent time on the internet contacting other family members to see if they can match up photos.  I have made some headway with a very distant relative who now lives in Cyprus.  We share a great great grandmother - I have a photo that may be her - there are several members of the family photographed in the same place in the garden - my Cyprus relative was able to supply several photos with the same background- and she knew who they were.  She has kept quite a lot of family stuff including a sampler done by my great great grandmother Cicely.  I have my family tree on ancestry and a number of big files with everything written down - certificates and photos from my husband's side and mine.