If you have visited the Niagara County Genealogical Society library, you know we have several family histories and photos that aren’t found anywhere else. This is, in part, thanks to the many families with a local connection that have donated their own personal collections. We don’t like to think about our own mortality, but as genealogists we need to consider what will happen to our research after we are gone.
Donating your personal genealogy research to a local society ensures that years of careful research outlives any one individual and becomes part of the community’s collective memory. Personal collections may include items such as family histories, letters, diaries, photographs, and other documents such as a will. Donations are evaluated based on condition, local connection, and research value.
Why donate locally? Materials tied to a town, county, congregation, or regional industry are most valuable where they were created, as well as your local society gets the researchers who will use them the most—descendants.
Before offering a collection to your local genealogical society, do a light weeding of the material. Provide a brief inventory: a one- to two-page overview listing families, places, dates, and formats (e.g., “Smith family correspondence, 1908–1942; Newfane NY church programs; 3 photo albums with IDs”). Label photos with names/places where known and include a note if appropriate about what you created vs. what you only copied. Some societies accept digital PDFs of compiled family histories only and will turn away any loose charts. Call first to ask about their policies.
I recently received an email from a reader who shared her story showing the importance of these collections to a local organization. “After my aunt passed, I inherited six bankers’ boxes: letters, funeral cards, photo albums with pencil notes, and a typed 220-page family history of our family lines. Keeping the original order, I made a simple inventory and created a PDF of the manuscript with a table of contents and index. I contacted my local genealogical society in our town. We met, reviewed the materials, and I agreed to donate the information. Within months, the society featured three of our labeled photographs in a Facebook post on the history of a local yearly festival. A year later, a high school student researching her family tree saw the photos, found our letters, cited them, and emailed to say our great-grandfather’s descriptions of this event, mentioning her family, clarified a timeline missing from the research she could find. The collection left our attic and started doing real work for the genealogical community.”
This is a real-life example of how donating can and will help future researchers. Donating locally transforms private remembrance into public history—preserved and discoverable for generations to come. If you’d like to donate, reach out to your local genealogical society for more information. Unfortunately, most libraries don’t have oodles of extra space (two file cabinets, 10 unmarked binders and several stacks of paper is my genealogy research reality right now!), so it must be organized. Planning now will keep your research out of the landfill later and just maybe help your great-grandchild further the family tree.