Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It’s Saturday Night again – 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  What would you put into your own “Family History Time Capsule” for your descendants to open in the future?  What would you use for the capsule?  Where would you keep it?  Who should open it?

While I’ve never thought about a time capsule, I have thought about the concept of ‘passing down’ family items. So, for this exercise, my time capsule is a 10×10 room. In other words, my time capsule is my genealogy office. My ‘time capsule’ contains two bookcases containing family notebooks, my computer along with USB drives and filing cabinets.

Besides the notebooks for various branches of my family tree are notebooks for each of my brothers. These notebooks contain items related to their lives and their families. While some of the items are recent additions, many are the photos and family items kept by my parents.

The family notebooks contain documents and photos for the family unit. These documents and photos have been scanned and many have been shared to Ancestry and FamilySearch.

More family photos are found in the closet. While most closets contain clothes, the closet in my genealogy office also contains a filing cabinet. This filing cabinet contains scrapbooks and photo albums passed down by my grandmothers. Also in the closet are my mother’s photo albums. Many of these photos have been scanned, and also uploaded to FamilySearch.

A second filing cabinet contains paper research. Some of this paper research has been scanned while some has not. Most of it is from my early days of research. Those who ‘open’ my time capsule will likely ignore the items in this filing cabinet. Thus, I need to spend some time sifting thru the paper to scan and preserve documents that cannot be found on Ancestry or other sources of digital records.

And then we come to my computer. Since most of what is found on my bookshelves and in my filing cabinets has been scanned, my computer could be considered my time capsule. It contains

• Photos of family events in my PICTURES folder grouped in subfolders for the event
• Everything genealogy related in my GENEALOGY folder
• Photos, scanned images and downloaded images to support my family tree in surname subfolders in the GENEALOGY\EXHIBITS folder
• Everything DNA related in the GENEALOGY\DNA and GENEALOGY\yDNA folders
• Backups of my genealogy work, documents and pictures on USB drives

My computer is also my link to various online accounts. These accounts are like ‘windows’ into my time capsule. They allow distant cousins to access various aspects of my time capsule.

• Ancestry tree – Heartland Genealogy – updated using RootsMagic’s TreeShare
• FamilySearch – using RootsMagic’s feature allowing the linking of individuals in my RootsMagic file to the FamilySearch tree
• This blog — where I’ve share my research findings and reports from RootsMagic
• WikiTree — where I’m starting to share information about my ancestral lines

While my genealogy office is not locked, my computer does have a lock on it. Thus, I would have to share the ‘key’ with recipients of my time capsule. Currently, my husband is the only other person who knows the ‘key’. However, I need to share it with my brothers and potentially with my nieces and nephew since they will likely be the ones needing to ‘open’ my time capsule.