eMails and Genealogy

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

​Hope Spring has returned to your part of the world.  Here is has been up and down as far as temperatures and the weather.  Today is one of the beautiful spring days with little wind, bright sunshine and temperatures in the 70s.  Perfect in my book!  A recent email from my internet provider has sparked this week’s topic.  They are discontinuing their email service.  With so many memberships, online accounts and friends and family to contact this is a huge task.  Why am I bringing it up with genealogy?  We all have many emails and contacts over the years with our family history research.  How are we saving and protecting this data?  Let’s look at some things we can do.

​I have friends and family who tend to “throw out” emails that they’ve read immediately.  Their inboxes are tidy little things.  Mine not so much. I think it is the historian in me who tends to keep exchanges with family and friends.  I’ve used those emails to reach out and share new family history tidbits to past contacts.  I’ve read through old messages and rediscovered what was happening in my world during a particular time…a sick parent, a planned trip, new job…  In the past we had handwritten letters for those news snippets from family and friends.  I wonder what will be lost to future generations when email services are no more, or we are no more?  So, losing an email address that I’ve had “forever” seems like more than an inconvenience.
 
Here are some things that I plan to do:

1. Because I use Outlook, I think that my copies of emails are duplicated on Outlook from my provider’s server.  But to be safe, I plan to archive my email so that I can view again if I choose to do so.
2. Contacts—Contacts can be a tricky thing.  They come along with each computer and upgrade and if you’re not paying attention, your contact might not be in the contact list but instead found only in an old email.  I plan to take some time to review the contact information that I have and compare it to my most recent emails from people.  Do I have the most current email and phone number tied to that contact?
3. Create a new email account that is not connected to a particular internet service provider.  This is one that I should have done long ago.  Gmail and Outlook have a free service.  You can view the pros and cons of the two here.
4. Once I have cleaned up all of my contacts by confirming and updating their information, I’ll need to let them know about this change.  Since the entire email service is going away, I won’t have the luxury of using a forwarding process for those who forget and use the old email.
5. One thing that I want to do which isn’t tied to the timeline of my email service ending (as long as I archive my emails) is to make sure that I have save relevant emails/copies for genealogy review.  Just as it is a great idea to go back and reread old records with fresh eyes, you can do the same with family history email.  Or even present-day family email—are there any emails that you’d like to save that talk about family and covid or vaccinations or other things we are living through that twenty years from now might be interesting for your descendants?
6. Lastly, I’ll need to update all my genealogy memberships and contact information for online accounts.  Whew!  That’s going to take some time.  It might be a good time to cull those accounts that I’m no longer using or are no longer interested in.  Or take a look at my passwords.  Or look into a password manager.

 
All of this has made me think about online storage and what happens to our “genealogy stuff” when we are gone.  I think that will be a topic for another time.  Hopefully you won’t need to do anything with your email soon but it’s never too early to plan ahead.  Spend some time this week looking through your genealogy email.  You might find some treasures and you’ll be ahead of the game if your provider decides to discontinue your email service! Happy reviewing!