Forever Review

Photo by Gabby Orcutt on Unsplash

This past month I was able to visit with vendors at a genealogy workshop and had the opportunity to learn more about Forever. Focused on protecting memories for genealogy, it is an interesting company. Let’s look at what I learned.

If you’ve been doing family history research for a long time, you begin to think about what will happen to all my stuff if there is a natural disaster or you are no longer living. We all probably have nightmares of a dumpster pulled up to our home and years of genealogical information thrown out with the trash. If we are lucky there is someone else in our life from a younger generation who values our work and wants to keep our history alive.
 
Hopefully you are digitizing and uploading your information to the cloud and using other backup methods.  Forever does all of this for you with some interesting twists.  According to their site, the information uploaded is permanent. As the representative told me, it will be there for 100 years plus your lifetime. You can assign an “heir” who will continue to have access and rights after you are gone, ensuring that your descendants will continue to have access to these photos, documents, and memories you carefully curated.
 
You decide how much storage you need and can pay once for your data storage or use a monthly payment plan. You can share the information with however you wish. The key is that it is your data to control access. 
 
In addition to storage, they also provide Digital Conversion Services | FOREVER.com which has a variety of options for prices. According to what I learned, they do not ship your items overseas, rather the digitization is done in Wisconsin. Looking at pricing it appears to be comparable to other companies focused on digitization.
 
One of the offerings that intrigued me was the ability to print and order books. (Similar to companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and others.) In addition to the printed book, they have options for digital scrapbooking like Creative Memories. There are apps available to use with your storage so that your phone pictures are automatically backed up.
 
While I haven’t purchased anything from Forever yet, they’ve given me a lot to think about. It appears to be a well-designed site that is focused on saving family memories. If anything, I hope this blog reminds you of the importance of having backups of all that research. I know I will be doing more digital scanning to make sure that I have family history documents back up to the cloud. Happy Memory Saving!