Social Media as a Recorder of our Family History
Most who know me know that I am a big fan of Social for business, for keeping in touch with old friends and family. This week one of my cousins began the task of transferring all of our important scanned family photos and documents from myfamily.com to a new family facebook page she created. If memory serves me correctly we have had the old site for 12 years, yes tons of data. As I saw the initial facebook post begin to upload I was impressed at how organized my cousin was in the process. This by the way is what she refers to as a cousin site “a group for the descendants of” my maternal grandparents. 
There were six children of that marriage, 5 aunts and uncles and of course my mother. All are gone now and the first documents uploaded were the obituarys of each of the 6 children along with their spouses. One of my cousins expressed dismay at having to relive the death of her parents. I on the other hand enjoyed reviewing every one for dates, burial and survivors. It struck me that this may perhaps be the only way that future generations will know who came before them. One can learn a lot about your family tree on-line with ancestors.com but here is a better picture at what these folks did and where they did it. The coolest thing is this is private and allows you the opportunity to keep up with the family without being in your public FB stream.
Today I noticed one of my great, great uncles was married in a Church that is the oldest in that county and still has a congregation of about 50. He is buried in that church cemetery along with about 75 of my ancestors. I love this stuff. I hope my grandkids and their grandkids keep the digital history going. I guess we all hope that our time here means something, right?
Kevin Kirkpatrick is Director of Community Relations at Elmwood Terrace in the Western Suburbs of Chicago
