Is stuff online worth saving?

One hundred twenty-three years ago my great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel in Kansas City from asphyxiation from the gas having been left on over night (the hotel did not yet have electric lighting). A letter was hastily written on a piece of hotel stationary to be delivered to his wife in the neighboring farming community where she lived.

It is fortunate to me that someone thought to hang on to that note since I have become interested in genealogy and this was a fairly significant event in family history (had he not died I don't suppose I would be around since it was her second marriage that gave me my grandfather).

I long for scraps of anything that my dead relatives, wrote, created, etc. It connects me better to the past — the lives they lived, how they lived them. It somehow grounds me a little better ... well, it's rather hard to explain the draw of genealogy.

Sadly very little of the ephemera of everyday life was kept. I get it. It might have seemed like hanging on to junk mail — like you were a hoarder or whatever, but in this digital era we should be able to hold terabytes of what may appear to be ephemera.

I'm doing what I can – not for ego, I think, but for future generations that may find a connection to their past interesting.

This reminds me of a recent flea market experience. There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera.

It's hard to assign a value to these things. They are simultaneously junk and treasure. I think about the journey these items took to find their way to that flea market table. It was too diverse a collection to have come from one place. So I imagine all the paths each individual item traversed. The joy of the recipient reading a post card, holding on to it, rediscovering it on spring cleaning days. Or the photo living in an album or framed on a wall somewhere for a lifetime.

I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each.

> There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera.

> I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each.

I purchase, scan, and resell those kinds of things. I'd love to have a centralized, public repository in which to store the data. As our tech gets better at extracting data from that material more and more interesting applications could be developed. Imagine being able to find 100+ year old photos of your ancestors via facial recognition and extracted metadata searches.

I wish I could come up with a non-profit business model that worked for preserving that kind of stuff. I would love to gather up the historical ephemera that's being lost, catalog it via manual and automated processes, and make it available to the public. (Yes, I am aware there are privacy concerns. It's a pie-in-the-sky idea. I just hate to see all of the previously captured and curated effort that went into ephemera cast to the winds.)