Technological Limbo

Image from Illuminating the End of Time, Getty Museum Pub. 2012

A couple of weeks ago, a project landed in my lap unrelated to the ad business.  I was asked by a woman to sort through and catalogue boxes of letters, photos, and recordings to create a permanent family history for her children and grandchildren.  Most of the documents date from 1778 to 1900 and, being that I can read handwriting from the 18^th and 19^th century with ease (hey, it's a gift), I soon discovered just how deep and rich my client's family history was. 

In the tranche of documents were business contracts, Wills, and receipts, but more important were the dozens of letters written to and by family members.  The earliest is a portion of a military pass authorized on 30 May 1778 by Nicholas Gilman, an officer of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and subordinate to George Washington.  There was also a pass signed by Ben Franklin's son. 

Most fascinating to me were the letters written by my client's great, great, grandmother, Emma.  In these letters to her mother, and two surviving diaries, is the story of Emma's grand European tour in 1867-68, a daily account of her adventure crossing the prairie of Kansas into Colorado by wagon with her husband and 6 year-old daughter Virginia, in 1871, and her return to the Mediterranean and Paris at the height of the Belle Époque in 1887-88. Virginia, at age 21, also contributes to the historical record with letters home to her mother Emma while she studied at The Sorbonne in 1888-89. 

As I catalogued and scanned these letters I was struck by how fortunate my client was to have such an extensive record from her ancestors.  And the reason why it survived is because it was written on paper—a technology that only requires eyes or fingertips to get at its content.  It was only in the late 1800s that inventions were needed to access stored information.

In my lifetime, information storage has evolved from punch cards to magnetic storage to optical devices to electronic devices.  I have dozens of microfloppies from the '80s and '90s and CDs and DVDs from '90s and the Naughts that hold files, letters and articles that I can't read because I have no way to access them—floppy drives disappeared in the late '90s and CDs and DVDs are fast becoming useless as they are replaced with electronic storage.

Digital technologies give us the capability to store an increasing amount of information on ever-shrinking devices, but there is a trade-off.  Besides being fragile and totally dependent on power sources, each advancement in capacity and convenience makes our written past increasingly transient. 

For my client's convenience I scanned each letter so it can be shared electronically, but I also preserved each one in an acid-free folder and stored them in an archival quality boxes.  I made sure that whatever happens to the electronic files, the originals will survive another 200 years (stored in a cool and dry place, of course). 

I cannot imagine what kind of storage will be around 50 years from now when my children and grandchildren (I have two right now) try to assemble a family history.  One fact is clear, though: if I don't reproduce electronic files on paper now, it is unlikely they will ever see them then.