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.

Reclaim the Records Scores Another Victory for Genealogists

We have written several times in the past few years about the nonprofit organization called Reclaim the Records and its endless battles against governmental agencies on our behalf to open public records. This bold and tireless group is pretty much the David vs. Goliath of the genealogy world, taking on bureaucracy in state after state to ensure that genealogists have access to both indices and records that are, by law, open to the public. In their latest triumph for all of us, they have gone into action against the Department of Military Affairs, and they have won! We now have access to millions of records generated by the Veterans Administration for those military personnel who received benefits during the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries! This victory opens a huge record set that most of us have likely never known about. Read on for all the details!