Barriers To Genealogy In The Future

[Andrew Tarr]

In 100 years nobody will be doing hard copy of anything!

Hmmm, not so sure.  Remember all that talk about the Paperless Office?  yeah ...

But I was wondering where our beloved Ancestry and FindMyPast will be when the flow of new records has died down, and with it the prospect of staying solvent.  We'll have to depend on the volunteer websites - which are pretty reliable as a rule, of course.

[Andrew Tarr]

I suggest the biggest obstacle people will face is the "we don't mention that" culture. I speak from experience.

My maternal family tree is very traditional, people were/are married and they have children. Birth certificates are right and proper. Most take an interest.

That resonates strongly.  My mother's mother came from a family of five girls and four boys.  Only two girls married and had one child each; the other three were respectable spinster schoolmarms in Liverpool.  Questions about the four boys were quietly sidestepped.  My partially successful researches have shown that one died very young; one emigrated to Canada; one remained single with a respectable insurance job before vanishing in his thirties (allegedly having committed suicide); and the fourth can be found in a succession of ordinary jobs (never the same) including twice signing up for the army and twice being rejected as 'inefficient'.  I suspect he may have been a feckless practical joker: one of his census records said he was born in Jamaica - certainly untrue.

[KGarrad]

In 100 years nobody will be doing hard copy of anything!

Hmmm, not so sure.  Remember all that talk about the Paperless Office?  yeah ...

But I was wondering where our beloved Ancestry and FindMyPast will be when the flow of new records has died down, and with it the prospect of staying solvent.  We'll have to depend on the volunteer websites - which are pretty reliable as a rule, of course.

Do you know many youngsters who even read a book?
Everything has to be an "app", capable of being run on smartphones, tablets, and the like.

The changes I have seen in my 60+ years will pale into insignificance compared to what will/might happen in the next 100 years!


P.S. I have worked in IT since I left school, so I am tech-savvy!

[DavidG02]

P.S. I have worked in IT since I left school, so I am tech-savvy!

What do you think of archiving old sites , or even a site like Rootschat? Will server space allow this?

Old = a site today in 5 years time etc

[KGarrad]

When I started in IT, mainframe disc storage was very expensive, and not very big!
I remember moving to Imperial Group, where they updated 8k disc packs to 100k, and said "We'll never fill one of those"!!.

Suffice to say that my phone has more storage than the first mainframe site I worked on

I still have some 4k USB sticks somewhere!
A 32Gb USB stick costs just £3 these days

And PC World currently sells 8 TB storage for only £210.

Memory & storage sizes are growing exponentially, and the cost is reducing at an alarming rate!

You will probably be able to hold a complete library on a USB stick!

[3sillydogs]

I suggest the biggest obstacle people will face is the "we don't mention that" culture. I speak from experience.

Two of my brickwalls are as a result of "we don't mention that".  My dear old granny could have solved them if she hadn't seen fit to take the secrets to her grave with her.....
 
Who is the father of the child given up for adoption???
And
Were you the mother not the sister of the other one?

[3sillydogs]

On the subject of storage devices etc, while I am not tech savvie I am not completely neanderthal and the rate at which storage devices shrink never ceases to amaze me.

My 1gigs external hard drive that I have used for the past 5 years to store files and downloaded docs was the be all and end all for me, but it was pushed into dinosaurship when techie son came home from one of those Microsoft seminar type things with a flash drive smaller than  my thumbnail with a storage capacity of 16gigs!!!

And now on top of that I have learned how to use the "cloud"  so chuffed with myself, will be starting to retire the external slowly.....

[Andrew Tarr]

P.S. I have worked in IT since I left school, so I am tech-savvy!

What do you think of archiving old sites , or even a site like Rootschat? Will server space allow this?
Old = a site today in 5 years time etc

Having worked in IT since leaving school, you will recall the millennium project (I forget who did it) which was carefully turned into an electronic time-capsule; only the technology needed to read it is now obsolete.  So we need to be careful how we 'archive' stuff for the long (or even medium) term.  There is still something to be said for hard copy ....

[Guy Etchells]

P.S. I have worked in IT since I left school, so I am tech-savvy!

What do you think of archiving old sites , or even a site like Rootschat? Will server space allow this?

Old = a site today in 5 years time etc

What you mean like the Internet Archive (Wayback machine) no it will never happen

http://web.archive.org/web/20050328015619/http://www.rootschat.com/

Cheers
Guy