It’s not often that technology takes us backward, makes things more difficult or less accessible.

In just about every aspect of our lives, emerging and improving technology enhance our existence.

The exception is how we preserve our personal and family history.

Many of us have had the task of going through our parents’ belongings after they leave their homes or pass away. For me, that came in 2005.

Tucked away in the bottom of a closet were a half-dozen shoe boxes, stuffed full of photos, newspaper clippings, holiday/birthday cards, postcards and a few letters.

The oldest item dated to 1927, a faded photograph of my grandfather Thornton, his wife and their six girls, posing in front of a Model T Ford. We know the date, not because it was written on the back of the photo, but because of the content of the photo and a note scrawled on the back of the photo. All five daughters were visible. The baby, my Aunt O.C., was the bump in my grandmother’s belly. O.C. was born in early 1928. My grandmother died a year later from an aneurysm. She was just 34 years old.

Most of the content focused on my parents and their six kids, me being the baby of the family. Tons of Polaroid photos and newspaper clippings. In those days, there were things the local newspaper would not print. Photos of little league baseball teams were published whether the team won a title or not. Lists of the names of A students were printed after each report card came out. Faded clippings from football and basketball games printed in the newspaper were preserved when any of us were mentioned in those accounts. And so it went, snapshots of a family history tucked away in shoeboxes, faded, sure, but preserved.

Our family was pretty typical in that sense.

That time has come and gone.

I have only one box of “my stuff” tucked away in the closet and none of them are family photos or newspaper clippings. Altogether, I have one photo album, along with maybe two dozen print photos kept in frames.

What happened?

Technology.

According to data compiled by Statista, there are less than half as many weekday and Sunday papers in circulation now than there were two to three decades ago. Circulation decreased for weekday papers from nearly 63.3 million in 1984 to about 28.5 million papers in 2018. The Sunday editions reached their height of circulation about a decade later, with nearly 62.6 million Sunday editions distributed in 1993. About 25 years later, there were only 30.8 million Sunday papers distributed in the United States.

What print editions remain have far less content. Certainly, the days of newspapers recording the minutiae of community life have passed.

It’s not that families do not still record the milestones, both big and small. It’s that they are not preserved in print.

I was talking about this a few days ago with Mona Vance Ali, archivist for The Columbus Lowndes Public Library. Family collections are a big part of preserving local history, so Vance is familiar with this phenomenon, which she said is known as the digital black hole.

Today, 93% of photos are taken on smartphones. Relatively few of those are printed and, instead, often downloaded to a computer or put in “the cloud.” But these are fragile and mostly password protected. Many digital photos are discarded, or due to increased memory, left on cellphones and then lost when the cell phones are discarded. Or photos are transferred to social media and, again, are password protected. Today’s photographs are born digital and remain so.

As a result, digital photos are not easily retrieved, as well as less likely to be delivered to folks like Vance Ali, who is devoted to preserving some of this history.

Imagine discovering a trove of digital devices, presumably containing photos, left behind by a deceased relative. If the passwords are unknown, the devices will likely be tossed. There are companies that can access the stored data, but I wonder how many folks will bother with that expense. Will our children, grandchildren or friends comb through CDs and DVDs which are rarely used now? Few people have the hardware to read these items. I don’t.

News stories that feature a family member aren’t preserved in print, but linked to a website. But that information doesn’t stay there forever. All of us have clicked on a link only to be informed that content no longer exists.

It may well be that the period between the first widely-distributed printed newspapers/emergence of print photography and modern era of digital information – a period of roughly 200 years – may one day be considered the Golden Age of family history.

And technology will be the culprit.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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