Preserving My Blog

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Do you remember GeoCities? Or the genealogy forums on Genealogy.com?

Although the forums on Genealogy.com are no longer active, much of their content can still be found. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the countless genealogy websites that once lived on GeoCities. Many of those pages—and the research they contained—have simply disappeared.

No one can guarantee that today's websites will still be available twenty years from now. That's why I'm placing my faith in organizations that have a long-term commitment to preserving information, particularly FamilySearch, WikiTree, and the Internet Archive. They form an important part of the preservation plan that ChatGPT recently suggested for my genealogy research.

Among its recommendations were:

  • Export and preserve your blog in multiple formats (WordPress export, full site backup, PDF/EPUB collections) and archive it with the Internet Archive.
  • Create a comprehensive finding aid and legacy guide describing the entire collection and how it is organized.

As I reviewed those suggestions, I realized that I had already begun implementing much of that plan.

A couple of years ago, I started creating a comprehensive index to the Heartland Genealogy blog on WikiTree. That index has evolved into a true finding aid, providing researchers with a chronological guide to every post along with direct links to the original articles.

I had also compiled my blog posts through 2023 into PDF books and uploaded those volumes to the Internet Archive. Those archived books provide another layer of preservation should my website ever become unavailable.

In other words, this part of my preservation plan is already well underway. The recent conversation with ChatGPT didn't send me in a completely new direction—it confirmed that the steps I had already taken were worthwhile and highlighted a few additional ways to strengthen the long-term preservation of my genealogy research.

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