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As someone who got really deep into genealogy during pandemic, this type of thing is all too common.
In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire. San Francisco lost most of its historical documents in the 1906 earthquake and fires. The UK lost the 1931 census due to fire (and then didn't do one in 1941 because of the war). Millions of European church records have been thrown out. Often times these are the only record that someone existed at all.
We are now in an age where things can be easily scanned and archived, but they're are still millions of paper records that only exist in paper form in a filling cabinet somewhere.
That being said, genealogy today is 100x earlier than it was even 20 years ago. I have been able to find documents in minutes that took my grandparents years to find because they have been OCRd and are searchable online. However there is still a lot to be learned from old fashioned research, writing letters to and visiting city clerks hoping they may have interesting records about your ancestors.
I find genealogy pretty satisfying as a hobby and I recommend it to anyone who likes dipping their toes into multiple disciplines. You can go deep in document recognition, archiving, photo restoration, face identification, genetics/DNA, data models (GEDCOM), writing, community service (lots of archiving roles are volunteers at small governments or libraries). It is great way to connect with relatives, known or unknown, and scratches the problem solving itch for me.
It is a hobby/industry where the tools are mostly ancient and there is lots of room for "disruption".
In southwestern Germany, genealogy usually stops at the Thirty Years' War [0]. Where I come from, the population decline during the war was more than 66% [1]. Most church records were either destroyed in battle, or used as a heat source during the winter. Very often, people just stopped keeping birth records.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B...
In our own Indian family, family history is mostly an oral tradition. My grandparents and their relatives tell stories of their own relatives, so we know of a mythical great-great-grandfather who was apparently a doctor-on-horseback. My own parents know this history, but to a lesser extent, and given the rise of nuclear families, I am (and I suspect the other relatives of my generation) even less aware of this history.
In any case, written records are mostly unavailable. Our personal family history from the pre-1950 period is fading, and most of our history from before the 20th century is lost. We have our own stories to tell, and they'll eventually be forgotten too. It's sad to see older relatives grow frail, forget things, and die, but I've never felt a sense of historical loss.
Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.
Many European countries have records going back to the 1600s as does the US so there is just a wealth of information.
Americans are generally fascinated with people's origins and origin stories. I am sure some of that is historically - unfortunately -racially motivated. But also we are taught from an early age that the United States is a melting pot and we are fascinated by the immigrant story. The motivations on why someone would pick up and leave everyone they know to move to a new unknown place and also the cultures they bring with them.
With that, Americans also don't accept the United States as someplace people are from. Even if you're family has been here for 500 years, people still want to know where you're family came from originally. Only the indigenous Americans are "from" America.
The United States is young and with so many people coming from somewhere else, it is also a chance to connect with history. It can be fun to find an ancestor that fought in the revolutionary war, or was part of the Salem witch trials etc. It makes our history more real, and we have a lot less history to connect to than most of the rest of the world.
For me personally, it somewhat is inspiration and motivation. If any of my ancestors lived a different life, I wouldn't be here. If my great great grandfather didn't survive dysentery in the civil war, I wouldn't be here. I have family that left Ireland during the famine, following their history helps me contextualize big historical events. And helps me realize that people who weren't
I only recently started capturing my 97 year old grandfather's stories. Making it a project had helped me connect more with him. He grew up in a completely different world. Hearing his experiences listening to WWII breaking out or even little things like seeing his first movie and then his first color movie is so much more impactful than reading about the era in a book.
> Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.
If feels like we of European descent have all of the genealogical advantages. For most other folks, gleaning their family data seems to vary between brutal and impossible.
If you can I would recommend getting a voice recorder and sit down at a table with tea and get them talking. One of my family members does this a lot and it's really cool to hear my deceased family's voice from time to time.
I just spent several weeks in Germany, one of my goals was family history (my father was born in Dusseldorf, his father in Berlin), that whole side is dead now, basically. I had a much easier time in the west (my grandma's birthplace) than in the east, much of which was apparently due to war damage. It also turns out that my naive notion of just walking into the national archives and putting my grimy American fingers all over their paper records was objectionable to the Germans. But at least I made contacts, the archivist basically takes a fee and get back to you in a few months' time.
My birth certificate was scanned on microfilm. I recently requested a copy of my birth certificate since my original was tattered and on its way out, and the new certificate was unreadable. The registrar tried three times to print a new one, and it turns out the microfilm was not exposed correctly and the originals were discarded. They created a special certificate that has both the microfilm image and a “translation” so it’s actually useful.
For the DIY folks, Webtrees is a halfway decent platform: https://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/
Is there a reason to prefer Webtrees over an open source desktop app like Gramps?
In the same spirit, people who have boxes of old photos that have some historical interest either because of their age or persons of interest, should probably upload them on wikimedia. That's probably the best way to preserve them for future generations.
I have one better - a box, about 2 ft^3 in volume, of the negatives for every photograph my wife's grandmother took throughout her life. She kept them all in one box, moved with them several times, and only stopped when we got her a digital camera in ~2010. Even then, she didn't like the idea of re-using memory cards, so we just bought small ones in bulk. There were ~100 memory cards in the aforementioned box when I received it; I've since copied them all over to my "family long-term digital storage", which exists in multiple places and in multiple formats. In addition to that, I put them all on USB drives and distributed them to interested family members at a family reunion. Each year they get new thumb drives with whatever new data I've collected over the preceding year.
My problem is that I have thousands of negatives and slides, in several formats, and no easy to way scan them in bulk. While there are services out there that do it, all of the ones I've found in the past are both expensive (on the order of ~$0.25-$0.50 per image) and limited in the formats they support. Most only do 35mm negatives and maybe slides. I have 35mm, APS-C, 110, 120, 220, and even a bunch of 2.25" square negatives that I believe are from a Kodak Brownie.
I've not found any service that's truly as simple as "send them a box of negatives, get back a link to an S3 bucket with your photos" - and certainly none that are capable of supporting such a wide variety of formats.
To this point, I've just been spending a Saturday afternoon here and there scanning them individually, manually, on an old (but good quality) flatbed scanner. I 3D printed some negative holders and hacked together a Python script that looks for the "crop marks" on the holders, crops, straightens them, and drops them into a folder. There's a sidecar plaintext file in that folder that describes the envelope they were in and includes anything that was written on it. There's also an image named "front.jpg" and one named "back.jpg" in each folder that is a simple scan of the envelope. All of the scanned photos are kept in lossless TIFF, which is... unwieldy. At some point I'll probably pick a format with better (lossless) compression for the "originals" and move to that.
> In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire.
Yeah. That one was a killer. So much unique info that wasn't in other census. At the other end of the spectrum is the 1950 census which turned out to be disappointingly uninformative.
There was a large fire in St. Louis, so many people can't trace US military service before 1954 or so.
The scary thing is that laws like GDPR are going to make things even worse for the future historians.
Good to see this getting some attention again.
This affected me personally when trying to find a family member's military records. When I requested them I found out they were all gone because of that fire. It's astounding how much was lost as a result.
I ended up having to piece together information from other sources. Hospital records were in a different place, safe from the fire, for example, and you could use that to infer certain things about where they were at what time, and some of the records had some information in notes. But if they weren't ill at a certain point, you would have never had that.
There's still a lot that's unknown as a result of the fire.
I have no connection to my ancestors, that part of the family disappeared. I wish I could access my grandfather's WWII records, it would be a priceless link to the past.
I didn't know my father and tried to get his WWII medical records but was denied. IIRC, only he could auth their release and he'd been dead for 20yr.
I heard about this years ago from my father because it was why he had no service records despite being drafted.
When the HP archive burned to the ground, and since the Vatican library has tons of unscanned historical documents in its library, I posted here that one could just hire a bunch of students with phone cameras to take a snap page by page.
No skills are needed, no special equipment, either.
I was amazed at the pushback on this, because making copies should only be done by skilled archivists with expensive machines, and as a result, no copies are made and it all goes up in smoke.
I've archived quite a bit of family letters and stuff using a phone camera. You don't even need a stand for the camera. A kitchen table on a cloudy day is perfect. The pictures are sharp and clear, even if the document isn't perfectly flat.
Don't believe me? You've got a phone in your pocket. Take it out, take a pic of a document on your desk, and see for yourself.
I was amazed at the pushback on this, because making copies should only be done by skilled archivists with expensive machines, and as a result, no copies are made and it all goes up in smoke.
When I was still in the "ebookz" scene, around 2 decades ago now, "cammed" books were awful, so the pushback might be from those who experienced that era; but I agree that even phone cameras have become far better in quality since then.
Highly recommend apps like TurboScan. They automatically rectify the image and save in high contrast black & white (unless you want grey scale or color). Syncs with iCloud, etc. I used to use a dual-sided scanner for everything but have since just switched to this workflow and it’s great.
> Don't believe me? You've got a phone in your pocket. Take it out, take a pic of a document on your desk, and see for yourself.
Nice try NSA
I rely on the NSA to make backups for me.
You want a bunch of teens with iphones putting their greasy fingers all over priceless artifacts and you are amazed that someone would push back?
If you're hiring an untrained person and your only requirement is that they have a telephone, you're going to realize pretty quick that most of the documents you wanted to scan got sold to the black market.
My father’s was one of those records.
He got a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. He’s planted in Arlington.
We have no idea how he got the two stars. He never talked about the war.
I'm a veteran, and a couple of years ago I requested a copy of my service record from the US government. The set of medals listed in that was completely different from what it said on my DD214, and both were completely different from what I received in real life. Even if you were able to get that record, I would be very skeptical about using it as any kind of ground truth.
Family lore says my great uncle died in the second wave on Omaha Beach and was posthumously awarded a Bronze Start. And I have no reason to doubt this -- the people transmitting this information are fairly trustworthy in my experience. However, the medal itself has been lost. I was able to find records confirming his death on June 6, 1944, but a few years ago when my father looked into it, he found that the records that would document his award were destroyed in the fire. I don't know if we will ever be able to replace the lost award or find out more about his death. Makes me sad. I wish they had made copies of these records.
For high level awards, there are some separate databases that list the recipients and citations. Have you looked at those? E.g. https://valor.militarytimes.com/award/5
The UK lost the records of around 4M (of 6.5M) 1st World War personnel during the London blitz in 1940. The remaining records are available via the UK Records Office, despite being fire damaged. [Edit] They are also available online via https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1219/
My grandfather's records were in there. We found out when he died.
Through his entire life, he always told us that he was "The company clerk, like Klinger" during his time in WW2. When he died we found his discharge papers, which among other things listed his two medals for valor. As far as we know, they don't give medals for valor for processing paperwork.
Sadly, we will probably never know what he did to earn those medals, as anyone who might have been around then would be nearly 100 years old or more, and as the article says, the records went up in smoke.
If you know which unit he was in, they often maintained their own histories which, in many cases, are separately available online.
It's crazy how fires can destroy so many documents. Why, just in the past year, there was a fire at an NYPD evidence warehouse [0]! Unfortunately they could only recover a few documents. Oh well. Nothing to see there.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire...
I'm fascinated by stories of lost data. I wonder what is it that we're really losing? I can't tell, but there must be something. I lost my USB drive that had years of files on it last year. I don't even know what I lost at this point. Has my life changed? Has the meaning in my life changed? What does it mean for society if it doesn't mean much for individuals?
Does anyone have any recommendations on stuff I can read on the topic?
A few years ago, when trying to get my father in law into the (state-run, not VA) veteran's home, we had to have records of his service. I was surprised that he had kept and that I could still find in his house all of the original paperwork from when he was discharged in 1954. That made everything much easier than it might otherwise have been. A lesson for me on keeping ones own data.
Does anyone have any recommendations on stuff I can read on the topic?
Perhaps some Buddhist philosophy would help bring ease for letting go of past material existence?
A little over a month ago I had submitted a request to obtain my grandfather's records because when he was alive, he refused to talk about his experiences in WWII. Even his children don't know too much other than the unit he was in. the only time he ever talked about his service in the 2nd Armored Division was if he was extremely drunk and agitated.
A week ago I got this letter in the mail...
"Thank you for contacting the National Personnel Records Center. The record needed to answer your inquiry is not in our files. if the record were here on July 12, 1973, it would have been in the area that suffered the mos damage in the fire on that date and may have been destroyed. The fire destroyed the major portion of records of Army military personnel for the period 1912 through 1959, and records of Air Force personnel with surnames Hubbard through Z for the period 1947 through 1963. Fortunately, there are alternate records sources that often contain information which can be used to reconstruct service record data lost in the fire; however, complete records cannot be reconstructed"
"Due to the pandemic and a severely decreased workforce, we are unable to completely fulfill your request at this time. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have focused all available resources to providing a Report of Separation (DD Form 214 or its equivalent) for records requests..."
They were able to provide his enlistment record and a "WD AGO 53-55" form but nothing else. I'm hoping there are actually more detailed records because his last name started with a D and I just need to resubmit a request in a few years when they are able to dig deeper.
I'm curious how the NPRC relates to the DMDC. DMDC is the military-side and an old-school UNIX shop.
A few decades ago I needed proof of my military service, US Navy last duty in Vietnam, and was astounded to find that they had been in that St. Louis fire but I did get a copy of my DD 214 so not all was lost. I'd still like to get my records.
Saving you a click: A fire starting 7/12/1973 in the US National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, MO destroyed 17.5 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPFs), the paper records for many American veterans (WW1, WW2, Korean War, etc.) or former federal government workers who had served in the 20th century.
What a great story. I had my grandfathers WWII discharge papers but I knew about the fire and wanted to see if his records were lost. They partially were but I did get one page with all the important information including decorations! Funny the document I had and the document they had were slightly different.
I joined the US Army at the Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS) in Los Angeles, CA a couple months before the Rodney King riots. During the riots, there were a lot of fires, and the MEPS station burned down. When I got the basic training several months later, I saw that my paperwork had survived the fire, but much of the paper had charred/browned from heat & smoke.
Humanity will lose something when the ability to disappear and start a new life somewhere with no record is gone.
It goes away this century.
Lost my grandfathers WW2 records.
All I know is that he was in the 7th ID in the Aleutians and S.Pacific. Really wish there was some other form of those records.
how incredible that so many resources are dedicated to preserving the memories and records.
"There are no Accidents"
- Master Oogway
"There really are, though"
- Me