🌳 Family History & Genealogy
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Preserving & passing it on

You've gathered a lifetime of stories, photos, and records. Here's how to make sure it lasts — and actually reaches your family one day.

There are two halves to this, and most people only think about the first: keeping it safe while you're here, and making sure it survives and reaches people after you're gone. This page covers both, plus how to turn your work into something you can hold.

The one hard truth: one copy is no copy

⚠️ Everything on one hard drive, one laptop, or one USB stick will be lost It's not a question of if, but when. Drives fail with no warning, thumb drives corrupt and get lost, phones break. The most common heartbreak in family history is a lifetime of work that lived in exactly one place. The rest of this page is really just ways to make sure that's never you.

Keep it in three places

The simple rule the professionals use, in plain English:

If a flood, fire, theft, or dead hard drive takes one, the other two survive. Once a year, actually open a few files to make sure they still work.

The easiest, most durable trick of all: give it away Make copies and hand them to your children and cousins now. Email the photos, mail a USB stick to each child, share a folder. Family history that lives in five households across the country survives any single fire, death, or forgotten password — and it survives you automatically, because others already hold it.

Use formats that will still open

Plain, widely-used file types outlive fancy ones. The rule of thumb: if only one program can open it, it's at risk.

Watch out for iPhone photos Newer iPhones save photos as "HEIC," which often won't open on a relative's older Windows PC. For anything you're handing down, export or save it as JPEG first.

How long things really last

No physical media lasts forever untouched — so the trick isn't finding magic storage, it's keeping copies and refreshing them every few years.

The myth to retire: "It's on a drive in the drawer, so it's safe." A drive in a drawer is one copy on fragile media — the opposite of safe.

Cloud storage: convenient, but rented

Cloud storage is wonderful as your "somewhere else" copy — but it's rented, not owned. Stop paying or stop logging in, and it can be deleted. Spell that into your plan.

The myth to retire: "It's in the cloud, so it's forever." Cloud is convenient but conditional — never your only copy. If you'd rather own your storage than rent it, see Permanent.org under Give it a permanent home.

Make sure your family can actually get in

This is the half almost everyone forgets. Your family can't use what they can't open. These tools hand them the keys — the first two are free:

The single highest-impact thing you can do Write a one-page "in case of emergency" note — on paper, kept with your will or in a fireproof box — listing where the photos and files live, which drives and accounts exist, and where to find the passwords (not the passwords themselves on that same page). That one page turns all of the above into something your family can actually use.

A third myth to retire: "My family will figure out my passwords." They usually can't — Apple and Google lock heirs out without a legacy contact, and saved passwords are not released even to a Legacy Contact. Set it up while you can.

Give it a permanent home

To make sure your work outlives any single drive or account, also put it somewhere built to last:

Note: Ancestry is wonderful for research, but it's a paid subscription — access stops when payment stops, so it's not the place to count on for free, permanent preservation.

Turn it into something you can hold

Files are fragile; a book on a shelf gets handed down for generations. Easiest options first.

Make a book

Save the voices

Creative keepsakes

Where the Legacy Vault fits

Our companion Legacy Vault keeps your information in a single private file on your own device — no cloud, no account, nothing uploaded. That gives you privacy and control today. But be honest about the trade-off:

Local = control & privacy. Cloud/public = reach & durability. A complete plan uses both. A single private file is, by itself, one copy — and it does nothing to reach your family unless they know it exists and how to open it. So: keep the Vault for what's private, but (1) back it up in three places, (2) tell at least one relative it exists and where the access note lives, and (3) put the non-private parts — photos, your tree, the stories — somewhere public and permanent like FamilySearch.
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