The Old People in Your Town Are Walking History Books and They Are Running Out of Time

 There is an old man in your town or your neighborhood or your family who remembers things that no book records.

He remembers what the main street looked like sixty years ago. What businesses were there and who ran them. Which buildings got torn down and what replaced them. Which families were prominent and which ones struggled. What the big events were that shaped the community and how people felt about them at the time.

She remembers what it was like to be a young woman in this country before certain rights existed. What work was available to her and what was closed off. What she had to do to raise her kids. What the hardest years felt like from the inside.

They remember names. Faces. Stories. Details about how life actually worked that never made it into any official record.

And when they die all of that goes with them.

This Is the Most Urgent Preservation Problem There Is

Books can be reprinted. Photographs can be scanned from originals. Documents can be digitized. But once a person who carries living memory of a time and place is gone there is no recovery. No second chance. No way to go back and ask the questions you forgot to ask.

Every day that passes without someone recording these stories is a day of irreplaceable history lost.

How to Do an Oral History Interview

You do not need professional equipment or formal training. You need a phone with a voice recording app and a list of questions.

Start with basic biographical information. Where were you born. What were your parents like. Where did you grow up. What was your neighborhood like when you were young.

Move into specific memories. What do you remember about this town when you were a kid. What did you do for work. What were the big events that happened in your lifetime that you remember most clearly.

Ask about the community specifically. Who were the important people in this community when you were young. What businesses were here. What has changed the most. What do you wish young people knew about how things used to be.

Let them talk. The best oral history interviews follow the person's memory rather than sticking rigidly to a script.

Record the whole thing. Let them know you are recording. Save the file somewhere it will not get lost. And if possible transcribe it or have it transcribed so the information is searchable.

Where to Put What You Collect

StoryCorps at storycorps.org accepts oral history recordings and deposits them in the Library of Congress. Your recording could become part of the permanent national historical record.

Your local library's local history collection will often accept transcripts and recordings from community oral history projects.

Archive.org accepts audio uploads and preserves them permanently for free.

You can also publish excerpts or summaries on a blog with the person's permission. Making the knowledge public is what transforms a personal recording into a historical document.

Pick up the phone today. Call the oldest person you know. Tell them you want to hear their stories. You are running out of time and so are they.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Social Media Posts Are Primary Historical Sources and Nobody Is Saving Them

 In the summer of 2020 millions of people around the world posted on social media about what they were experiencing during a global pandemic, a major wave of protests over racial justice, and a contentious election season.

Those posts were raw, real, firsthand accounts of what it felt like to be alive during one of the most significant periods in recent American history. They captured things that no journalist or historian could capture. The confusion and fear of the early pandemic. The anger and hope of the protest movement. The way ordinary people experienced and understood what was happening around them.

Most of those posts are already gone or inaccessible.

Why Social Media Is a Historical Source

When historians study a period of history they rely on primary sources. Documents written by people who were actually there. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper accounts. Official records.

Social media posts are exactly that. They are firsthand accounts written in real time by people experiencing events directly. They capture the language people actually used. The emotions they actually felt. The way they understood events before the official narrative got written.

For future historians trying to understand the early twenty first century, social media is one of the richest primary sources available. The problem is that most of it is not being preserved in a usable form.

Why Most of It Will Disappear

Social media companies control their platforms and can change the rules at any time. Accounts get deleted. Platforms go out of business. Posts get removed for violating terms of service that change without notice. Companies decide to limit the archiving of old content.

Twitter, now X, has made repeated changes to its platform that have affected access to historical posts. TikTok videos disappear when accounts are deleted. Facebook has changed its privacy settings in ways that make older public content inaccessible. Instagram has purged accounts for inactivity.

The Library of Congress attempted to archive all public Twitter posts from 2006 through 2017. The project proved so massive and technically complex that they eventually had to scale it back significantly.

The early days of social media are already partially lost. And we are adding more content every day while losing access to what came before.

What You Can Do

Save your own important posts. Screenshot them. Copy the text somewhere you control. Do not assume the platform will keep them.

If you post things worth preserving, post them in multiple places. A blog post is more permanent than a social media post. Text on archive.org is more permanent than text on a platform you do not control.

For posts you want to preserve because they document something important, use the Wayback Machine's save page feature at web.archive.org/save to create an archived copy of any public URL.

Support the Internet Archive. They are doing the work of trying to capture and preserve the web including social media content at a scale that no individual can match.

And keep writing. Keep posting. Keep documenting what you see and feel and experience. The fact that platforms are fragile does not mean the content is not worth creating. It just means you need to be thoughtful about where you put it and how you save it.

The historical record of this era is being written right now. Some of it will survive. Make sure your part of it does.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

You Should Be Photographing Old Cemeteries Before They Disappear Forever

 There is a cemetery in Aiken County South Carolina that has headstones dating back to before the Civil War. Some of them are so weathered you can barely read the names. A few of them have already become unreadable. And nobody has been out there in years to document what is left.

That cemetery is not unusual. There are thousands like it across this country.

What Is in Those Cemeteries

Old cemeteries are one of the richest sources of historical information that exists for ordinary people.

A headstone tells you a name. A birth date. A death date. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an occupation or a cause of death or a brief description of who the person was. All of that is historical information that exists nowhere else for many of the people buried there.

Family cemeteries on old farmland often contain multiple generations of a single family. Church cemeteries contain the history of entire communities going back as far as the congregation existed. Municipal cemeteries contain the records of everyone who died in a place over generations, including people who left no other documentation behind.

Why They Are Disappearing

Many old cemeteries are on private land that has changed hands multiple times. The current owner may not even know the cemetery is there. Or they may know and not care about maintaining it. Or they may be planning to sell the land for development.

Wooden grave markers rot away in a few decades. Stone markers crack and weather until the inscriptions become unreadable. Without someone to maintain the vegetation around them, headstones get covered by brush and eventually buried.

In some cases cemeteries have literally been paved over. Highways and parking lots and developments built without anyone bothering to check what was there before.

What You Can Do

Go out to old cemeteries in your area and photograph every headstone you can read. You do not need special equipment. Your phone camera is sufficient.

Upload your photographs to Find A Grave at findagrave.com or BillionGraves at billiongraves.com. Both of these sites are free and allow volunteers to add photographs and transcriptions of headstone information. What you upload becomes part of a permanent searchable database that genealogists and historians around the world can access.

If you find a cemetery that is overgrown, contact your local county historical society. Many areas have volunteer cemetery restoration groups who will come out and help clean up and document a neglected site.

If you find evidence of a cemetery that has been destroyed or built over, document what you know and report it to your state historic preservation office. Many states have laws protecting burial sites even when they are on private land.

Those names deserve to be in the record. All it takes is someone willing to go out there and write them down.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.