Archive Yourself

I’ve been thinking a lot about archives.

I’m an amateur historian, so I spend a lot of time looking into the past. Part of looking into the past is field work - in my case, going out into the Pine Barrens and exploring where these ghost towns were. Another big part of that is doing research. What was this town? Who lived there? How does that place fit into the broader context of the region?

The Pine Barrens historian is lucky in some ways, and unlucky in others. From the 1920’s through the 1960’s, a historian and folklorist named Henry Charlton Beck spent a lot of time in the region, documenting the history and culture of the Pine Barrens. He saw things that don’t exist anymore, and in a lot of ways, he paved the way for other historians through the ages (myself included) to follow on through his research. We’re lucky because of all of the places in the United States, how many have had generations of historians doing research? I’m sure there are dozens of cellar holes and half-hidden clearings in the wilds of Pennsylvania, or Oregon, or wherever that nobody knows about. The people who lived there are long dead, and nobody cared much to archive the knowledge of the place.

The thing is, we only know the history of the Pine Barrens through the context of those who documented things. So while Beck was a great folklorist, he didn’t spend a lot of time describing cellar holes, or what he found at his forgotten towns. He described the people who lived there, maybe a short anecdote or two, and not much else. Historians who have followed since have documented things better or worse depending on their own interests. Right off the bat we don’t have an accurate historical record anymore.

Maybe that’s the problem with history? How faithful are our archives - our history - of things when we gloss over the mundane and the humdrum and focus on the more exciting things? Are they intrinsically worth more? Of our past, what is worth saving? Will there be some future relative, two centuries from now, who will wonder what I ate for breakfast today, December 28, 2007?

I also wonder about the trend towards digital archives. My website is a pretty useful research tool for those interested in the history of the Pine Barrens. There’s a lot documented there that isn’t mentioned in any book. Personal stories that are fascinating, but would never be published. How do you go about archiving a website for scholarly use five centuries down the road? Sure, you can say that the Internet Archive project spiders sites and saves them, but the IA has problems fetching old versions of my site from 2002 — can we trust it to be useful in five hundred years? Would anybody have a HTML browser in five hundred years? Will people even know the HTML specification then? If the answer is no, then what we have is a lot of history held in a very transient medium, that will likely not be accessible to anybody in the future. The problem is, however, that websites generally don’t translate well into other mediums. So, what do you do?

One of the things I want to do is research my family tree some more. I’ve not really been able to trace my ancestry back further than 1860 or so, which in my opinion is terribly recent. Is my family information gone forever? What about the lives of my ancestors in the 1600’s? If there is no record of them, what of their lives? Were they spent in vain, only to serve as breeding stock for the next generation? What about their hopes, dreams, and fears?

I’ve been meaning to sit down and document my life for Dana. Not to be pretentious, but because there’s so many experiences that I’ve had - good and bad - that it might be good to write them down, and maybe after I’m gone, some ancestor of mine will come along and be interested in my life. The question I wrestle with, though, is what medium do I use? I would love to install a copy of Wordpress on a local server and blog my way through my life. The problem is, of course, the transient nature of web published data, as well as the danger of hard drive failures, fire, etc. I could write, but again, a fire could come along and destroy my journal. Plus, handwriting is not really in a friendly format for future researchers. I could make up a bunch of Word files, get a Mozy account, and back them up somewhere — and maybe that’s the best idea, although who knows if MS Word will be readable in the future, and I can’t stand writing in a plain text editor under Windows.

I like to think that I’m not alone here. We all, in a way, live our lives in bubbles. If people wrote more, documented more, left more for their future, it not only would put our lives in the best context of all - our own - but preserves what we all do, what we live for, for future generations. I don’t want to be a name and a date on a family tree in five hundred years. I want someone to know about my experiences growing up, my impressions of things, my mode of thinking.