Dr Nick Barratt on the importance of recording our personal heritage

Family Tree talks to Dr Nick Barratt about why it's so important to record family memories, and how we can safeguard our digital records for posterity.

Nick Barratt is a historian, genealogist and among his many titles, also honorary associate professor of public history at the University of Nottingham. 

Family Tree: As honorary associate professor of public history at the University of Nottingham, you’re very keen to encourage people to record their personal heritage. Why do you feel this is so important?

Nick Barratt: It’s important for several reasons. Family historians spend vast amounts of time looking over their shoulders to the past, trying to piece together what happened to their ancestors – often at the expense of recording their own lives for generations to come! With the erosion of the printed record in favour of the digital, we run the risk of becoming the forgotten generation.

Equally, the history books are mainly about the ‘great and the good’, so it’s important that ‘our’ stories are included in the national picture. Finally, there’s an emerging body of evidence that the very act of curating our memories can be good for us – this sort of cognitive behaviour can help prevent the onset of various types of dementia by keeping the brain fresh. So legacy, visibility and wellbeing – three excellent reasons!

Family Tree: Another aspect of your work concentrates on the curation of digital memory. What problems to digital records pose for our descendants, and how can we as family historians, help to safeguard our digital records for posterity?

Nick Barratt: We have no idea – none whatsoever – if we will go down in human history as generating the most amount of information about ourselves, or leave no physical trace at all. This is mainly because we conduct our lives increasingly in the cloud, online. Very few people write letters, send postcards, creates physical photo albums or writes a diary – all this activity is done for us via social media networks through the miracle of the smart phone.

So for the here and now, there’s almost too much data; yet very little is being properly or permanently archived. This is why a resource such as Famicity is important – it focuses on legacy content management. Even so, it might be worth committing a few treasured memories to paper, just in case…

Famicity website

Famicity is a new website which combines preserving family history and new memories, allowings uers to share photos, documents and family trees directly with their network, whilst retaining full ownership of their uploaded data. 

The site is offering a free of charge service during the festive period, to allow everyone to share and preserve their treasured moments.

Dr Nick Barratt said of Famicity: 'I’ve worked with many genealogy sites over the years but I’m very excited about the launch of Famicity as it truly helps users record and preserve memories in the most efficient way for everyone and not just expert social media users. The holidays bring a great deal of joy as well as challenges of what is shareable on social media. This site takes care of those concerns for users as well as eliminating storage issues we all encounter frequently in the digital age.

'In addition, the GEDCOM import feature is the icing on the Christmas pudding! It’s the best time of year and way to honour your family by showcasing your family history research.'

Visit Famicity to start your journey today.