Where do YOU go to find out your past?

And how much has already disappeared.

Your question for today: where did your parents live? Especially before you were born? And where would you look to find out?

That has been my job this week, and up until 1965 it has been simple: look in the Calgary phone books. It’s fast and easy because the Medicine Hat & District Genealogical Society has them all scanned in and on-line.

Unfortunately for me, we all left Calgary in 1965 and moved to Kelowna. Which is how I’ve come to conclude that finding BC Telephone phone books is tougher than you might imagine. The Vancouver Public Library has “ the years 1955, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964. 1965” but that’s it. If someone else has the balance of those records I haven’t found them. Even Ancestry.ca, who suggest strongly that they have them, doesn’t seem to.

Now I’ll ask you to stop for a minute and think about all of the records from your past that may have just disappeared. And not just paper phone-books, but all of the on-line things that, over the last few decades, have been created, then abandoned by either you or the companies running the web site.

When you put your entire family archives on Facebook, keep in mind that at any moment Meta could choose to just shut them down, or delete them for reasons that make no sense to you.

And with the ever expanding media concentration of ownership of TV, Radio, and print media, and with the shift from actual paper newspapers to on-line content, there’s a real likelihood that large swathes of our past will just disappear one day when a bean-counter in the US or elsewhere decides that maintaining that access isn’t sufficiently profitable.

Why does that matter? With Trump in the White House again it feels as if we may face a need for this advice that was front and center in every Alberta phone book in 1965.