I realized this year, especially after my recent exchanges with my uncle about the old neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, that there is a tremendous amount of genealogical information contained in the body of emails. Not every email has a ged or pdf attachment that can be easyily saved. Some emails have drips of important family history information. Some simply recount an exchange of research conducted.
I have implemented a policy to save all emails that contain family history information. And by saving I don't mean not deleting them! I use the 'save as' feature in my email and save the text of the email as a txt file in the appropriate genealogical folders on my computer.
In the last year I have gone through two computer crashes alone. While I have the old email files they are not in my current email file. That means I have to do a little work to find them. What if someday I accidentally delete them or forget where they are? If I save individual emails as text files I never have to worry about the original email.
I have gone back and saved all the critical emails from my uncle from the past few months. Now I need to do some deeper work and mine my old tucked away email file as well.
What about you? Do you regularly save your emails from family members or distant cousins? You could be losing a tremendous resource if you don't.
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I have a large file of surname files, broken down into even smaller files. Each one has email going back to the 1990s. This was one of my first ways of filing information "way back when". These files have scanned images, letters, photos, email and stuff cut and pasted from blogs and bulletin boards such as found on Ancestry and Rootsweb. You never know if a bulletin board will close, or a blog when shut down.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder to save them. I often print out the emails and put them in the appropriate family file.
ReplyDeleteOh oh oh... such a good suggestion and you are so right!!! So much information comes in these emails.
ReplyDeleteI save all my emails but I opted against saving them in a different format such as a text file. The reason is that I ended up with sometimes dozens of email exchanges saved in dozens of different files all within a folder with no real way to find the one I want besides opening them up one at a time and reading. Instead, I just save them into a genealogy folder within my email program and then I use the built in search feature to pull up all emails pertaining to a certain surname. You can then do a sub-search for all emails pertaining to a surname that contain a specific word and this guides me to the email that I was looking for much faster. (If the email has something that I KNOW is really important, I will save it into another format with an appropriate name so that it can easily be found later.) I then use an online backup service to back up my computer, all genealogy files and emails included, so that if my computer shucks out or my house burns up, I have all my files intact and would have only lost the hard copies of everything. My particular backup service also allows me to access every file from anywhere in the world with an internet connection which comes in handy too.
ReplyDeleteI should add another benefit to not saving them out into separate files is that you don't loose the context of back and forth email exchanges. Most modern email programs such as Gmail, allow you to keep back-and-forth email exchanges all grouped together. So if I search for a particular email and find it only to find out it referenced an earlier email, they are all attached and with one more click, you can revisit the previous email as well.
ReplyDeleteI do save emails. Txt and pdf are my format of preference. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with the flow of it. Especially if there is a great deal of back and forth exchange emails. Having those emails saved has definitely paid off on more than 1 occasion.
ReplyDeleteWhat I timely reminder. I've been trying to give myself pep talk on this topic for the last few months. Reading it has been much more effective. thanks!!
ReplyDeleteI have filters set up in Gmail for all my surnames with corresponding folders. When an email comes in with a filtered name it gets "archived" and goes directly to that folder. It still shows as unread in the corresponding folder, so I know to look for a new email. Now my question is, should I be worried about how long Gmail is keeping my "archived" emails???
ReplyDeleteEach of my family binders has a section called "correspondence"; I print the e-mails out and put them there.
ReplyDeleteI have emails saved in surname folders on my email providers server. They do regular backups so they should be safe. Still I think I should do a little more and create an additional back of my own.
ReplyDeleteRegards, Jim
I "print" important emails to PDF (a Mac function, but can be done with add-ons in Windows), and save the PDFs. I put the number 1 at the start of the file name for the first email in a thread that I save. Then if the thread/conversation continues, I save each subsequent email preceded by the next number chronologically. I do that for all my client emails as well as ones that pertain to personal research. This is in addition to saving them in folders within Gmail.
ReplyDeleteI also save my emails but I save the sent copy that way I know what my responses were.
ReplyDeleteI save all my genealogy related email in surname folders that I have created in my Windowslive. I prefer not to leave emails on the server. When my computer crashed back around Christmas I had a hard time retrieving those emails and when I finally found them I filed them away in their respective surname folders in C:\MyFiles\Genealogy. Thanks for reminding me that I need to start saving them in both places!
ReplyDeleteI use Outlook as my email client. I opt to download the emails to my PC (as opposed to leaving them on the server). I create folders within Outlook and save the emails to the appropriate folder (both incoming emails and sent ones). These folders are stored within Outlook's .pst files, which I regularly back up.
ReplyDeleteI send all email to the old version of EverNote, categorize it, and periodically print it out as pdf. One pdf per person, one email per page. Then, of course, it's backed up to external hard-drives.
DeleteI use Thunderbird mail and keep a daily backup of my entire Thunderbird profile so if my computer crashed I could still get it all back exactly the way it is.