Those Pesky Passwords are the Key to Your Digital Legacy

You’ve just encountered a new website, created a username and a unique password, and are ready to spend a few hours researching, looking for a special gift, or just watching a recording or two. We do this mindlessly now, since we have to do it so often. For most websites, it hardly matters, since we may only use them for a little while and then move on. But think about those websites that you use all the time, perhaps where you do your banking or access your stock market updates, places where you’ve stored credit card numbers, and, for most of us, sites where we have stored family trees, photos, documents, and DNA results. Have you thought of what happens to that information when you can no longer maintain it? It's scary to face our own mortality, but let’s look at some options.

Ancestors with No Children: Why You Need to Research Them!

One of the basic guidelines of doing thorough genealogical research is to always work on collateral family lines. That simply means we should not just attempt to go back in a straight line from child to parent to grandparent, etc., but to remember that all our ancestors were part of families, and every sibling is important to our research, whether they had children of their own or not. In fact, sometimes the childless members of our families provide us with the exact information we need to break down our stubborn brick walls. This is one of the four topics our guest speaker, D. Joshua Taylor, will present at the StLGS Fall Speaker Series, Saturday, 1 October 2022, and we have stories from our own genealogical research to share.