It's all relative. As this is a genealogy blog, you might think I was talking about ancestors, but I'm not. It's about correspondence and related subjects. Really about how things change around us bit by bit so we don't really notice until we think back about how we used to do things.
Things like staying in touch with far flung friends and relatives. That used to be done by letter or, if you were feeling particularly flush, maybe a long distance phone call, preferably on a Sunday when rates were cheaper. No wonder people lost touch with each other. Not only were those distant relatives out of the loop wen it came to being in the know about what was going on in your life. They probably didn't have many acquaintances in common. Although, that wasn't true in all cases, especially in earlier instances of chain migration.
But at least with letters there was a paper trail. I prize the one sided correspondence from my grandparent's 1954 trip around the world. Another prized but one sided correspondence was that between my 2 x great-granduncle, Alexander Matheson, and his sister, Margaret Thomson, when they were able to connect after losing touch for 40 years.
Now that we are awash in digital correspondence in the form of emails and texts, will people in the future have access to our output or will it be lost like information stored on floppy discs or CDs? How will people who come after us find our words, the records of our lives?
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