Thursday, April 24, 2014

Are We Making History Anymore?



History class was always my worst subject in school. None of my teachers told those really awesome stories (like my friends' teachers) about what happened long ago. History for me was "dry" and loaded with dates and facts! 

But where would we be today without history? Well guess what, folks, we may be finding out sooner than you think. Oh, no, the world is not coming to an end, but recorded history may be.

Let's begin with correspondence.  When was the last time you wrote a letter? Or a postcard? Or a thank you note (sore subject for me)? Or have you received a real letter lately? E-mail and text messages do not count. They can be easily deleted and whoosh, they are gone! If you plan to make an important statement, there will be little documentation to prove it in a deleted computer message. 

Real history has been preserved and documented in letters. Having spent hours upon hours reading through letters saved by my MIL, I now feel like I know family members and friends that passed away long before even my hub was born. Make sure you leave behind concrete evidence of everything important in your life. Scrapbooks and portfolios are excellent " filing" places. We keep our really important papers/documents in our safe. Maybe I need a safe for letters, too.

We also have rich history from portraits and photos. Thanks to a huge collection of kept photographs, the figures of our family's past have become real. 

I hear you. You take photos. And you take a lot! But where do they go? "Oh, I saved them on my iPad." Well, so what! Within a few years ( or maybe months!) that apparatus will be abandoned. Unless you save them on your PC and make sure that PC never crashes or gets dumped or they are saved in the "cloud,", those photographs are "nowhere." And unless someone besides you looks at your photography, you should have saved your time by simply taking a photo with your mind. You know what I mean. 

Print off some of your favorite snapshots. Mount them in albums or at least stash them in a shoebox or drawer for someone to find after you have forgotten them or you have gone to a "better place." And if you are really good, you will make sure you leave captions to identify the persons, places, or things.

As an avid collector of vintage/old stuff, I am afraid that we won't even have a history if we stop recording it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ever since we got the digital camera our photos are stored on the computer and we never look at them. We have two albums full of photos documenting our grandsons first two years of life...then we got the digital camera....there is no album for the granddaughter. We do have a digital memory picture frame but I keep forgetting to put pictures on it.

Sherry @ Thrift My House said...

So true! I need to print some photos! I'm bad about that.

Jill said...

I joined an international postcard exchange called Postcrossing - it's neat to send out cards and get a few back, but, there's only one problem, it's hard to find postcards to buy. I even went to the Science Centre the other day, I was sure I would get some there, they had one and it wasn't worth buying - the clerk said "everything is digital" - yes, I know!!