I’ve had Gmail since 2004. Recently while searching it for some correspondence from a few months ago, I also discovered correspondence with a relative regarding our common ancestors from 2017. There was nothing new in that correspondence that had been neglected, but I did realize that I had lost touch with the relative. Seeing their message reminded me that I had never asked him if our common ancestors had a family Bible of which he was aware.
He wasn’t. But I realized that I had written about the sibling of our common ancestor for a recent issue of Casefile Clues and that I should send him that issue along with what I had discovered. I also realized that it might be time to keep a spreadsheet of my correspondence, something which I have never done. I also remembered that before the cloud was quite the thing it is now that I was in the habit of emailing myself images of documents I had made. Those are also buried in my email.
I’ve decided to search through my old emails for ancestral names and the like and to track those searches in a spreadsheet. There’s probably some leads, correspondence, and documents that need filing and follow-up. There may be clues buried in my old emails.
3 Responses
Good idea to made a spreadsheet/log of correspondence. I will do that from now on. Problem is I have loads of stuff over 20 years to go over. I also regret the many photos passed on to me that I did not write a note of which extended relative passed it on to me.
The problem is that we all have stuff from the early days or before we “knew what to do” that can be a lot to slog through.
This is a good reminder and I have fone this too. I have been grateful for my Gmail account in several ways.
After a laptop hard drive failure and my cloud backup failure, I was thankful I was able to go through my emails and at least save all photos I had shared with others or emailed to myself. At that time I was also able to rescan paper certificates I had bought and filed away. That was a huge relief that not everything was lost.