I spent many hours this past weekend delving, with the help of my Spousal Unit (SU), into a couple of big cardboard cartons filled with old family photos and documents that I inherited some years ago from my mother.
When I say “old,” I mean “about a decade-older-than-ancient,” at least by contemporary standards. On my mother’s-mother’s-mother’s side of my family (got that?) I am descended from German/Alsatian Jews who arrived in America a few decades before the Civil War and settled in Louisville, Kentucky, and later Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks to a family tree compiled years ago by my first cousin, Anne Goldgar, (now a professor of history at the King’s College, London), I can trace part of my mother’s family back to my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham Lieberman, born in 1774 in Brishberg, Bavaria; died in Louisville in 1885.
And I can tell you with some confidence that, since well before that time, nobody on that side of my family has ever thrown anything remotely significant away. (Admittedly, this now seems like a good thing.) Here are a few of the things we discovered in the midden boxes:
- Many newspaper clippings, some dating back to 1930, reporting various family engagements, weddings, births, and deaths
- A large photographic portrait of my grandmother (born 1896) as an infant
- A photograph of my grandfather with his high school class, about 1910
- Various formal portraits of my great-grandmother Corrinne (born 1866) and great-grandfather Charles (ditto)
- Copy of a formal proclamation praising of the contribution to the local school board of my great-grandmother, who was a mover in Nashville civic circles until her death in 1928 (there was a high school there named after her)
- Photographs of my great-great grandmother (born 1844)-and-father (born 1842), dating from shortly after the Civil War.
- The ketuba or wedding contract from their wedding, dated October 14, 1863
Truthfully, reviewing this stuff, handling a 145-year old piece of paper covered with neat Hebrew printing, looking at faded but still-legible photographs labeled on the back in my grandmother’s wriggly handwriting, I felt an overwhelming sense of connection to my family. I was very aware that all these things had been literally passed from hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand for generations, until they came into my own.
These irreplaceable artifacts are all printed on that most archaic and retrograde of media, paper. And while many of the newspaper clippings are yellowed and a little flakey, most of the material is in surprisingly good condition. The ketuba, despite being lettered by hand, was perfectly legible (good penmanship was something to be proud of in those days); it looked closer to 15 years old than 150.
I wonder if any of the digital record that we produce in the course of our daily lives today will be as legible and readily accessible to our descendants, say, 150 years hence? Unlikely, me thinks.
In fact, my house is filled now with all sorts of electronic media and devices that I can’t even access anymore. I have boxes of VHS tapes that I suppose we could still watch—if I still had the VCR hooked up. The visual record of our trip to China to adopt our daughter back in 1996 resides on a proprietary Sanyo Camcorder cartridge that we have no way of watching since the camcorder itself kicked the bucket (shortly after its warranty expired, natch).
While CDs and DVDs were both claimed to be archival when they were first rolled out to consumers, anyone with a small child in the house knows that all it really takes to render them incomprehensible and useless is one good scratch. (Another good reason to hang on to my vinyl copy of Saxophone Colossus.) The information stored on USB-flash drives is said to be good for years; we’ll see.
I can no longer even read the original digital versions of many things I produced myself. For years I kept the floppy disks containing the manuscripts and notes for all of the magazine articles I wrote when I was just starting out, back in the early 80s. I had boxes of old 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppies, filled with files written with WordStar (an early word-processing program that someone once aptly described as so user-unfriendly, “it was like waltzing with a refrigerator”.)
But every time I traded up my computer system—from CP/M to DOS to Windows 3.0 to Windows 95, etc., to the present Apple OS X 10.5—my technical capability to read the information on those disks receded further, just beyond my reach, into the ungraspable past. New hardware and software may be labelled “backwards compatible” for a few years, but inevitably the window is closed shut, and older formats and systems are eventually orphaned and abandoned—rendering their information all but irretrievable. When was the last time you saw a computer with a built-in 5.25-inch floppy-disk drive? Probably while George H. W. Bush was still in the White House.
Finally, I realized that with no computer that could read my old floppies, they were about as decipherable as Linear B and I tossed them all out.
Sic transit C:\>. Chalk up one advantage for dead trees.
Brave New Whirl 
This is a lovely piece, Mark. I am inputting my grandmother Rosie’s handwritten memoir onto my computer, hopefully so it can be published and distributed to her daughters–my mother and her two sisters and their families. My grandmother wrote it in lovely calligraphy on lined paper, which is a little brittle but which still smells of her apartment, like mink coats and mothballs. While I know that much will be lost by putting this on the computer, my hope is to be able to cost-effectively distribute it, on PAPER, to everyone in my extended family. Anyway, thanks for another wise and moving post. You have a book in there somewhere, me thinks.
Very sad and very true. I thought about this problem several years ago and started to use Apple’s Kodak connection to make books of photographs. Over the years I have made books from different trips. I usually make them in duplicate and give them to each of my children. Hopefully they will save them and it will mean something to them in the future…we’ll see.