Family research 50 years from now- will our descendants read our emails?

Question:This "family research" thing is interesting and one day everyone will have their family history documented, whether they want it or not, I have no doubt.

At present the way it is usually done, is that people scan old microfiches of newspapers, birth certificates, parish records etc.

But in 50 years time our decendants will be able to go to Yahoo, Google or whoever is in charge and say "here's Great Gradaddy's IP address from 2008, can you let us see all the emails he sent and received please..."

What's the betting that Yahoo, etc will be quite happy to sell this info at a price?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: This "family research" thing is interesting and one day everyone will have their family history documented, whether they want it or not, I have no doubt.

At present the way it is usually done, is that people scan old microfiches of newspapers, birth certificates, parish records etc.

But in 50 years time our decendants will be able to go to Yahoo, Google or whoever is in charge and say "here's Great Gradaddy's IP address from 2008, can you let us see all the emails he sent and received please..."

What's the betting that Yahoo, etc will be quite happy to sell this info at a price?

I think they'll get bored.

Genealogists have long known about a "brick wall," a place in time and space where there is a lack of information.

I personally have found something worse: I call it a "pile of rubble," a situation in which you have so much information that it is overwhelming, and cannot be assembled into a coherent thought-form again.

My bet is not on Yahoo. Google is the one attempting to become the controlling info-god.

Happy hunting! And watch what you say in e-mails!

God forbid!

I do not see that happening. However, if someone wants to save all those emails to a disk for their descendants to read I could see that happening.

I actually do have emails stored on my computer, which I transferred through several hard drives, and different programs. The operative factor here is that I KNOW the difference between email stored on my system/ hard drive, or mail stored on external servers. In fact, I made the mistake of storing many information based emails in one yahoo account for the sake of not clogging my hard drive. I did not access it for several months, and it got deleted, since they considered it inactive. My bad, for not remembering to back it up. There was a court case where family of a deceased soldier asked yahoo for the password to his account for obvious reasons.. yahoo flat refused. So.. I personally disagree that they will bother keeping mail on server space, it will be deleted.
Any kind of email is easily saved into a text file, then it can be inserted to the notes portion of standard genealogy programs. The same is true of any jpeg file which includes pics or scans. Now, when the program puts out a gedcom, any of that becomes part of the gedcom file. This all is standard.. people should be insuring that their data is fully protected. A copy of any gedcom should also be stored away from the home.... which is very true when you live in a place like Dallas (as I do) and have things like wild weather/ tornados, etc.

It is virtually impossible for any one to trace their complete family tree. Even today records are not complete; by the time you consider all the mistakes...
Written national records only began about 1 1/2 centuries ago...
By the time you go back 3 centuries, most people could not read or write (sorta like today!)
Then there is the problem of people's ancestors marrying (or mating with) people who were closely related...)
As to the e-mails...Did you ever watch Dark Angel or any of those type shows? A mere solar flare could wipe out all that stuff.

I already research my wife's e-mails.