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.

30 years ago there was no digital world. Nearly all information was in physical artifacts. The things worth saving haven't really changed, but the amount of noise they are buried in has. Imagine if that letter was kept in a two ton pile of ad fliers. Sure, someone would find some of those fliers interesting, but you'd have been much less likely to even know about the letter.

Well, I remember a lot of great stuff on Usenet circa 1994, but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups, which used to archive it in a searchable way.

There was a ton of great stuff 30 years ago, and I think it's definitely worth saving.

The Internet was a very different place, but it was quite real 30 years ago, and I think the idea that the further back you go the more valuable this kind of thing is is the right way of looking at it.