Last year I found an easter egg that my father left for me in his address database. (He died in 2013, but was afflicted with Alzheimer's for the last 10 years of his life.)
From my father's address book (a DbaseII file that was last updated on December 15th 1992). This was a note associated with my contact info.
Found on February 16, 2020.
Hi there, son.
I doubt if anyone else will ever see these memos, but if anybody ever does, it will have to be you because you would be the only one with enough computer savy to dig them out. Hope you are doing well--and if I'm not still in this dimension when you see this--have a drink to your old dad's memory. Having you around gave me most of the pleasure in our family's growing up period!
Live long and prosper...............
Thank you for sharing this, it's a beautiful expression of how uplifting emotion can be even in the face of how fleeting our lives are; especially during these times!
I would leave one of these for my wife, but she'd never find it. she will, however, inevitably discover my journal, and hopefully that will be nice for her.
My grandfather never wrote much in his life, he was a man of physical work. When he turned 80, he suddenly wrote up his whole life story, end-to-end.
I've always wondered how complete versus sanitised his hand-written book might be, but there is some pretty gruesome stuff in it including eating a dog to avoid starvation, which resulted in extra torture because the only meat available was the beloved dog owned by the very commander of the prisoner of war camp where he was held during/after WWII.
Perhaps one day, I shall scan, OCR/type in, and publish it.
Similar thing told by my grandfather, who was imprisoned in Russia for some time: They had to eat the grass to avoid starving. Every morning someone would be frozen to death and prisoners had to stick close together to not freeze. Or someone would have drowned in a puddle of water over night. Horrible gruesome situations.
He said things became much better in terms of food, when later on he was imprisoned in some US prison (not sure that was in the US or in another place but managed by US).
After so and so much time in Russian POW camp, he got moved to some US prison (camp?). Only after that he was released.
They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners and so he first had to be in a Russian camp and then later in a US managed camp.
In documentaries you can also see, that some more qualified people got moved to "in the middle of nowhere" in Russia and Siberia as "experts" to help with building something up, where before German soldiers had destroyed. If you are willing, you can watch some kind of war documentary at least every second day in Germany. After you have seen your 20th documentary, you might get tired of it. However, many of the old people watch that stuff over and over. I guess it is because of the huge impact those events had on so many lives in their youth and to keep in mind how horrible things went. Perhaps also to try and get some kind of understanding of how a society could screw up so badly. And perhaps they want to know about all the evil things that happened, which they did not know about. The things that happened outside of the eyes of most people.
There is no lack of educational material at least. Just a day ago I saw an announcement on TV for another documentary for one of the almost infinite sides of that history: A documentary showing photographs and short clips taken by hobby photographers in 44 or 45 or so, showing a deceptive calm in some places in Germany, basically before things rolled all the way back, with only few indications of impending doom. You see, there is always something TV stations can send about it. Every little detail can be looked at and a documentary made about it.
When my grandfather had was called into the army, he was 15 years old. Send to the east, to fight a war. Many young people of that generation never finished school before entering the army. Basically children soldiers. They had to go back to school, as adults, when they returned from war and imprisonment. Re-education and further education. Imagine that contrast. I think it must have been hard for many of them, with post war trauma and all those memories.
He was either extremely fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it. Came into a field hospital with a headshot wound, but somehow survived. The doctor told him, that he could drink and smoke as much as he wanted to, because he wouldn't make it much longer anyway. I think that must have been a German field hospital and then later he must have been captured, and of course, as part of the army, taken prisoner of war.
Well, he managed to stick around until a few years ago, reaching old age of over 90 years.
> They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners
As a practical matter, it may also be easier to guard and manage prisoners who are busy and tired from work, rather
than idle and restless. For a detailed view of the late-war
and early post-war years, I can suggest: _Savage Continent_, by Keith Lowe - https://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538728/after-wwii-europe-w...
When it's said that the concentration camps were "liberated", this mostly means that the guards on the fences were changed, and any intentional killings were stopped. But it took quite some time to actually empty the camps. From the Harrison report:
>We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.
This was in August 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Moving millions of people around in postwar Europe wasn't easy, or quick.
Obviously, all sides destroyed railways or bridges when possible. What few left operational were running at capacity just moving food, troops, and critical replacement parts. If you're a Allied junior lieutenant, and you're put in charge of a camp of 50,000 people, do you just throw open the gates, and tell them to walk home? If there was food to buy, which there wasn't, (Everyone had conscripted all their farmers. Europe had food supply problems for years afterward) they didn't have any money to buy it. Nobody had ration cards. They were lucky to have identity papers at all.
And, of course, the Allies were correctly paranoid about security. The countryside was littered with weapons. Let a starving DP out of a camp, a few days later he might be sorely tempted to pick up a fallen rifle and ambush the next checkpoint he sees.
Or... you could just leave them in the camp, where they're all in one place, not clogging the roads, where you can more or less feed them, and where you can eventually get around to handing out Nansen passports, when you feel like it.
> Perhaps one day, I shall scan, OCR/type in, and publish it.
My grandpa (who I never met) was in Fiji during WW2 - not combat but support staff on some base. Turns out he kept a journal that my uncle now has. He made a photocopy and gave it to my dad. I was super excited to read about his experiences, so I asked for my own copy. I typed the whole thing up and even looked up references to what he was talking about. (There were a lot of entries about him going to see this movie or that with his buddies, but I hadn't heard of 90% of them, so I added IMDB links.)
Almost the entire thing was mundane day-to-day goings-on and temperature and weather comments. He built cabinets for the base, went for beer with his friends, got letters from home, etc. I was expecting/hoping to at least hear his thoughts on things or what he wanted to do when he returned to the States.
You might reach out to your local library or nearest university library. Many of them have some sort of local document repository. This is the sort of thing that should at the very least be photographed page by page. They would have done microfiche back in the day.
Even without OCR, it's valuable.
Trust me on this: do a simple phone capture (photos) as immediately as possible. We always delay things, and then they get lost irrevocably - in fire, flood, during the move, accidentally destroyed. Do plan doing the "capture proper", but do this simple one ASAP - it could take 15-30-60 minutes, but at least you'd have some sort of a backup.
Unfortunately, I am speaking from experience: just recently, I discovered that many years of my own notes were quite water damaged by a leaky pipe I wasn't even aware was there... and the slowly dripping water found its way to it through and over a random maze of random things worthy of the Rube Goldberg himself.
It is well worth archiving. I recently helped typeset and publish (via Amazon) a diary written by one of my ancestors - https://amzn.to/3tmUI3l ($0.99 as that's the lowest price Amazon accepts, but you can read the preview to get the gist)
It is written by a homesteader in 1930s North Dakota, and she just relates bits of her life, her family, and her favorite recipes. Simple, yet it's still a remarkable way to evoke the life of the era, and worth preserving and sharing as you are comfortable.
On a related note, you may want to be sure you take care with the actual physical media you have as well. Time and improper storage can render things unreadable - archival boxes (https://www.archivalmethods.com/ and elsewhere) are made to be neutral/alkaline rather than acidic, and are the sort of things museums use to preserve artifacts.
My grandpa wrote a rough draft of a memoir of his childhood. He grew up in a German-speaking town in the US around WWI, and he wanted to capture that experience since the harassment that happened to German-Americans during WWI caused those communities to Anglicize. He had more than a few sarcastic references about "patriots."
Yes please! It would very interested to read it all. Also sorry for what your grandpa had to go through. Stories like these never fail to remind me how -mostly- lucky and privileged we are to live in such peaceful times.
Same story with my grandfather and two world wars, communism, dictatorship, repressions. Unfortunately however a couldn't find yet a correctly working OCR that recognize his handwriting. Anyway, I scanned all the pages because the notebooks are rapidly degrading.
Tangentially, I started my family a bit late in life, as such my daughter will be barely into her 30s by the time I reach my 70s. I started a journal for this reason - so maybe whatever family she has can know me. Might be a tad narcissistic, but I regret not having know my own grandparents very well, so maybe they will appreciate one day.
Thats not narcissistic but a very good idea. My wife is an orphan, and especially now we have our own kid, we wonder a lot about how her parents would think about this or that.
I never even got to meet one of my grandparents. All I have is stories, and honestly not a lot of those.
I don't think you should feel narcissistic at all. Family is one of the prime places where we share our wisdom and values. Where we pass on the results of our mistakes in the hopes that the next generation avoids them. Don't feel bad for trying to do that, it's one of the fundamental elements of human progress.
I have the same age difference with my father. I have always been a melancholic and curious person so I ask a lot of questions. I think most people will have those questions that naturally come to them at some point. When you realize your parents are people with their own memories, hopes and flaws, a step that's probably called adulthood.
A very common trigger for this, as I've asked about this topic to other people with elderly fathers, is becoming a parent. But for me it was leaving home.
Also make room for such conversations. We had a month long vacation, just the two of us, which I remember fondly, even though there was no big event or deep discussion.
I was born late in both my parent's lives, and even though I'm only in my 40's, they are both now gone. The letters my folks wrote home while we were stationed overseas are one of my personal treasures. You might be writing for grandchildren, but don't downplay how important these artifacts are, even for children who already have spent years getting to know you!
Reading the prosaic thoughts of my parents when talking to other adults was like peeking behind the curtain, and it helped me understand them better as people, not just Mom and Dad. I am grateful for it.
I had a great-grandfather who was in the SS, in one of the divisions that wasn't really known for their good deeds to say the least. There is a journal which he wrote, I have yet to gather the courage to read it. All I know is some vague stories that go around in the family but from what I gather it isn't probably too pretty what he did.
It's typical that most people will tell you their grandpa was in the resistance, rarely they will tell you that they collaborated.
There could be some serious historical value or insights in that journal, even if there are terrible deeds listed within. If you can't bring yourself to read it, perhaps consider sharing it with a WWII museum or historian.
They might be willing to leave your great-grandfather's name out of it, if that's a concern for you.
I will definitely have to do something with it, at the very least photocopy it as another user suggested. It has luckily survived a fire, but I don't know if it'll be around forever.
> Even today, interesting things from the Second World War resurface. When people move house, when a house is demolished or when an attic is cleared. These finds can range from a pile of letters, to photos, films, diaries, documents or objects. Don’t throw these documents away. NIOD welcomes donations of new material.
Lots of people did shitty things in that war (and all wars), and honestly if Germany had won the war it likely would have been all condoned, like the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan is. The Japanese committed vast atrocities in China, but they were never made to sit in a war crimes communal because the US thought the chemical warfare research was worthwhile knowing. Either way, what you grandfather did or didn't do doesn't make you a bad person, and reading it might give you reflection to make better choices in your life?
Don't know much about the history of this, but it seems like there were substantial war crimes tribunals in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#War_crime_.... Almost a thousand executed, and thousands more given some prison time, including some very high ranking generals and politicians.
I see, yeah it's not surprising there were exceptions. Obviously agree with your larger point that winners tend not to subject themselves to tribunals.
>honestly if Germany had won the war it likely would have been all condoned
Oh, yeah, undoubtedly. "History is written by the victors" is one of the truest cliches. But whether crimes or atrocities are acknowledged or punished tells you nothing about the impact or severity of the actions.
So, while one could certainly recite a laundry list of atrocities committed by the Allies which a victorious Nazi Germany would have prosecuted, and many by Imperial Japan that went unpunished (though you're wrong that none of them were charged with war crimes - many were, even if many others like Unit 731 escaped prosecution due to the US wanting their research [edit: I see someone else responded with this before I finished my reply]), WWII is difficult to write off as "everyone and everything was awful" like a lot of wars.
Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.
All this to say - if the parent poster's great-grandfather was a member of a Waffen-SS division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity, for example, it can't and shouldn't be dismissed as "well, that's war, everyone is culpable, and you can't know what it was like to be in their shoes, and either side would be considered as evil if the other side won". (I know you didn't quite say that, but there is a certain false semi-equivalence here, I think.) It's not exactly wrong, but it misses a lot of the bigger picture.
> if the parent poster's great-grandfather was a member of a Waffen-SS division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity
Britain and Belgium especially have this all over their history, and no one cares.
Wrt Britain what are you referring to particularly? I know all sorts of terrible things British people have done, and some 'we' are doing (selling weapons to people for murdering citizens, currently) but I've not heard of murder squads in Britain since the civil war??
Your reference to Britain having done what the Waffen SS did:
"division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity"
I thought you meant that. It's not more palatable, but actions abroad have a different complexion somehow. Governments can get away with actions the citizenry don't witness (or citizens can claim ignorance) which is different to if there's literally squads picking people off the streets in front of your own eyes; which is what you referred to.
Like I said, I'm aware of many atrocities by British people but just not of that particular one in recent history?
I'm guessing they're mostly referring to the history of colonialism by imperial Britain and King Leopold of Belgium. I'm not sure anything was on the scale of the extent of the Nazi regime's worst actions (though Leopold wasn't far off), but there were certainly many atrocities.
Oh my. Well just off the top of my head. The UK has committed widespread systematic war crimes/crimes against humanity for generations in Ireland (+ is responsible for the deaths of the famine), Kenya, India, South Africa and localised war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and many Asian countries. Bombing of Dresden also. To name but a few. Then you can probably argue forcing and dumping opium on China is another one.
> Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.
You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization? My read is a) they mostly don't and b) there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans going back centuries.
The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
> there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans
For example, CNN's Rick Santorum:
> We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.
The real curiosity is why corporate media allows such speech to be broadcast as if it was in any way truthful. Let's all forget that the US Constitution was based in part on the Iroquois Confederacy [1].
Santorum is on CNN's payroll. Who or whatever is supporting Santorum isn't stupid, likely it supports some revenue/marketing scheme. All of this is fully funded.
Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious. In what way is it not? Especially for the first few decades after a particular event. I'd agree that the victors don't necessarily have a permanent monopoly on history.
It is a very lazy and ultimately harmful way to introduce the concept of bias. There isn't really a perfectly pithy way to cover such a complex topic, but much better than winners writing history is writers writing history. This is more useful than it initially seems because until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that. To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes. Or the senatorial elite can be argued to have "lost" the struggle at the end of the Republic that eventually produced Augustus, but the Roman literary classes were fairly ensconced within (or at least sympathetic towards) that order, and thus we often see the fall of the Republic presented negatively.
Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
Maybe it'd be more accurate to say "the immediate history that holds the most power in a certain area tends to be the history that's written by the most powerful entities in that area at that time", or something?
Nazi Germany wasn't able to spread its narrative anywhere once it lost its power, while the Allies were able to spread theirs in most places. If Nazi Germany had decisively won and became the top global superpower, I that situation probably would've been reversed.
Genghis Khan didn't hold the most power in certain areas after a certain period of time. When he did hold that power, even if the literary classes under his rule hated him, I assume their narratives probably wouldn't have spread or been believed very widely? Due to self-censorship, direct censorship and violence from his forces, and his counter-narratives. But maybe I'm wrong; I know very little about historiography.
Indeed, however there was something uniquely terrible about the Nazi atrocities.
The Nazis invaded countries and then systematically got to the task of murdering their entire totally harmless Jewish population, simply because of their ethnicity.
There was no possible military or tribal gain or anything, it was just pure racial hatred.
What's especially horrifying is that Germany was a very advanced civilization using sophisticated and systematic means to accomplish this.
> Lots of people did shitty things in that war (and all wars)
I don't think Germany's singular goal of racial domination - and specifically extermination of world Jewry - is comparable to most wars. Nazi Germany is viewed differently historically because it was different.
That is not to say OP's grandfather is responsible for all of Nazi Germany's actions, but it is not just "lots of people did shitty things."
>I don't think Germany's singular goal of racial domination - and specifically extermination of world Jewry - is comparable to most wars.
That wasn't the reason for the war. Nor were there any country actually try to help the jews before or during the war.
It's also not different from thoughts at the time held throughout the western world. Britain specifically didn't help the jews during ww2 because they thought they would flood Palestine (a british colony) after the war. A famous quote in Canada before ww2 was that "We'd take as many as we can, but none was too much." America as well famously turned away boat loads of jews.
> Nor were there any country actually try to help the jews before or during the war.
Depending on how you define "country" (as opposed to just "a large fraction or majority of its citizens"), Denmark did in fact help Jews, at least Danish ones.
And the story of Bulgaria is .. complicated. Again, they protected Bulgarian Jews in practice.
Portugal helped not only Portuguese Jews, but many others as well. In particular, they generally allowed a huge number of refugees (16% of the country's population), including Jews, into the country.
It's true that the main Allied powers were not particularly going out of their way to help Jews, but "any country" is a high bar.
That's absolutely veritably false. The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported crimes in the Auschwitz complex to the western public in 1941.
Yes you are correct. I should amend my previous statement.
>It was only afterwards that evidence of holocaust was verified and/or believed.*
The reports from the Polish government in exile did not make front page news. I'd still stand by the earlier statement:
> Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII.
You might argue that Poland wanted to save the Jews, but at the point that reports of mass murder were coming out of Germany in 1941, the Polish government no longer had a country to manage. They had exited WWII as losers.
Reports of mass murder of Jews weren't verified by the USG until 1942. I would still argue that saving the Jews did not even crack the top 10 reasons for the USG invading Europe. After all, they verified these reports and still waited 2 years before making landfall.
>Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII
&
>Reports of mass murder of Jews weren't verified by the USG until 1942. I would still argue that saving the Jews did not even crack the top 10 reasons for the USG invading Europe. After all, they verified these reports and still waited 2 years before making landfall.
Yes, America turned away boatloads of Jews. Yes, the world did not do enough, and turned a blind eye when it didn't affect them directly.
> That wasn't the reason for the war.
This is false. Hitler spoke and wrote at length about the "Jewish problem." It wasn't the _only_ reason for the war but it certainly was _a_ reason for the war. Even the war against the USSR was framed as against "Jewish Bolsheviks."
This is aside from the fact that OP referenced their grandfather being a member of the SS. The SS was _not_ the German army. The SS was the military organization of the Nazi party - often conflicting with the army to achieve their goals. They enforced racial policy in Germany and its conquests, ran the concentration camps and death camps, and were specifically tasked with eliminating Jews.
Perhaps it is because of the collective guilt of not having done enough for Jews at the time, but people often gloss over the explicitly racial and antisemitic aspect of World War II. The extermination of Jews was not a byproduct, it was one of the key goals.
For further detail, I encourage the interested reader to check out "The War Against the Jews" by Lucy Davidowitz.
Agreed, a single market Europe is all the US cares about
It doesn't care if its German run, Russian run (as long as it is market based and not marxist based), or “not-German” wink run like today
It would have been tolerable just like Saudi Arabia is tolerable
Liquidity, market depth, and less people to negotiate with is the American priority
The moral highground arguments that it upholds now and in hindsight are just to continue deriving support from its own people, who culturally eat that shit up, but it can successfully package any moral argument for any scenario even if they are complete lies
that doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective. The larger your bloc is, the stronger your negotiating position is. The stronger your negotiating position is, the more you can make the US pay for your goods and services
It makes very little sense to want simpler negotiations in lieu of a strong negotiating position
The Monuments Men Foundation[0] is a non-profit that, while they typically deal with artistic works, can absolutely assist with getting this to the right people to preserve it for historical value.
When you say "It's typical that most people will tell you their grandpa was in the resistance, rarely they will tell you that they collaborated." - do you mean that people lie about being in the resistance or do you mean that they only talk about the war if they were part of the resistance?
Of course it might not really be lying but just being selective about what to say. Many people were collaborators early in the war when it looked like Germany was winning, but gradually shifted over to the resistance when it began to look like they would eventually lose.
Many people don't know because of the shame, their parents never told them they or their parents were collaborators. After the war many destroyed as much evidence of their crimes and kept everything to themselves. In the Netherlands the death penalty was brought back for just for these crimes after not having been carried out since 1850 (officially abolished in 1870).
There was a strong desire for revenge in the first years after the war. That meant anyone who did anything 'wrong' was not going to talk about it.
Not op, but both happen. People do lie about their own past when it is politically or otherwise inconvenient. Including to their own family. People also lie about their relatives past, if it is convenient.
And people are more likely to talk about their family past if it sounds cool and good. They are less likely to talk about ugly parts of it.
Regardless of whether ugly is personal, business related or political.
I know what you mean, OP. On the other hand, your great-grandfather was just a man, and he lived under very difficult circumstances. I'd like to think that I would have risked my life and resisted in his shoes; but I have no idea. Best case scenario is that his diary humanizes him to you and to others.
(Speaking as a Jewish American with no SSS relatives but many who perished in the Holocaust, FWIW)
>Best case scenario is that his diary humanizes him to you and to others.
And the worst case scenario is that his diary demonizes him. Given the stories they mention and the potential SS division they hint at (perhaps one of the mobile death squad or extermination camp divisions), it seems quite possible.
But, especially so long after he's died, it might be better to know who he really was, whichever way it turns out. If I had a relative who potentially did and expressed terrible things, even though it'd hurt, I think I'd want to know the truth.
Or, as another commenter said, they could ask someone else to read it and give a vague but honest summary. If the contents are bad, they can learn that fact without the additional serious emotional impact of reading the lurid details.
There was a lot of mental manipulation to scapegoat the Jews for everything, to make them be seen as animals and not humans. I think reading this paper can help to better identify how the media tries to manipulate us.
No, one hundred times no. Just ask yourself the opposite: should a child be honored for the goodness of his parents, if he is a vicious criminal? It's obvious that he shouldn't. By what principle could we say that, but still hold children responsible for their parents' wrongdoing?
I've found people's handwriting deteriorate as time has gone by... cursive is rarer to come by (leaving the 'legibility' argument aside), typing has certainly contributed to this, but some people still write on boards to explore ideas and boy are those diagrams and writings unreadable.
If the author posted some samples of the grandfather's notes (withholding personal information), that would have added a very personal touch to the article indeed, and also ensured his ancestor's work gets recorded by archive.com.
I've been consistently embarrassed by my writing and drawing (cursive, block, white boarding, etc) since I was a kid, and I can't seem to get any better. My wife's penmanship in any situation is... great (stunning by comparison). I can read stuff she wrote 20 years ago - I have trouble rereading my own notes from 2 minutes ago.
Writing love letters and other notes to my girlfriend prompted me to look up videos on handwriting. It honestly doesn't take long -- in preschool it was torture, but as an adult you can achieve big gains in an hour.
Other people here, what did you use? I see there are a ton of options - Getty-Dubay is mentioned below but there seem to be many other similar systems.
That loopy-style cursive they taught us in school was so damn ugly, even when done perfectly, and not especially fast. I never understood why they were making us learn it. Its existence only made any sense to me whatsoever when I learned it was designed with a fountain pen in mind.
This type of 'discovery' won't be possible with the next generation as the digital version of that would be locked on some media (possibly encrypted) somewhere forever.
I did write a physical journal for a couple of years (and tried to start last year again briefly), but it just takes so much time compared to digital. The year I wrote all digital I spent half the time but more than double the detail and word count (like the difference was ~45,000 words a year versus ~123,000 words a year). For the physical one I would spend up to 90 minutes a day sometimes (I can write 2-3k for a single day sometimes) and have terrible hand cramps afterwards.
And also as a safety measure I ended up transcribing the physical version to digital anyway.
Most of it is notes in regards to studying and coming up with my game designs, but there are also personal life events and last year, some pandemic commentary I included in part just to document parts of this crazy period of time I lived through.
2020 was actually a bad year for writing though, and I only wrote about 47,000 words total last year (and 2021 even worse, I've still only written a couple of entries for this year). Pandemic screwed up my morning 'Go to Starbucks and write in the diary while drinking coffee' habit.
But one thing I'm planning to do for the digital years is to (eventually) print out a copy via Lulu or something, so there's still a physical copy somewhere. Also my digital version is in Markdown plain-text on my Dropbox, so it's in the cloud and on every computer I've got.
Also eventually I'll probably burn that plus some video/board game files onto a gold archive disc, so it will have a decent chance at still being readable 100+ years in the future, assuming there are still means of reading optical discs.
Yes, having a phisical version is worth it. Reading your writings in a nicely bound Lulu book should elate you, you might even get a new perspective on your ideas. I am a painter and have lots of little format paintings but never had a show nor seen them on a wall and am not intending anytime soon, Id rather spend that time and energy on actual painting. However, I really want to print my works in Lulu books, on volumes by year or some thematic thing. Choosing and picking is keeping me from actually doing it so am looking to pay someone to do it for me.
People in the past just spent more time doing fewer things. Today we feel rushed in everything we do so we can get on to the next thing.
Also, a well considered 45,000 words might be better for the long term than 123,000 words that are stream of consciousness. A lot less to read later, if nothing else.
I wouldn't say the 45k words were any more well considered. I just managed to finish less days and was always playing catchup.
It also wasn't quite a stream of consciousness. I did have specific things I talked about, usually written as a quick bulleted list in a notes app to remind me ahead of time because I was always days or weeks behind anyway.
It's just that I was trying to explain full game ideas and the thought processes that led me to the different ideas I was trying with game prototypes, what worked and what didn't, and also served as a rough game manual when I wanted to revisit the game idea later (which I've done several times).
Also I tend to be pretty verbose, which is evident by my Hacker News and Reddit comments.
I keep a daily journal using the Day One app. [1] It has a nice feature to print-to-order a physical book of your entries. I have done this for a few "collections" of entries such as birthdays, weddings and other special/big events per year.
And of course I regularly export my entries to PDF and text files which I keep backed up in several places. While not fool proof I believe it is enough to ensure it is all available if I were to suddenly die tomorrow. Perhaps a few recent entries might get lost if they cannot access the most recent entries locked in Day One but the vast majority should remain.
Obviously I don't know if any kids or grandkids (if I have any one day) will ever read all I have written but it will at least be there should they want to :)
I don't journal for them though. I do it for myself. Day One prompts me each day to review past entries for the day which I love. I also like to sit down from time to time and read back to past memories. It is full not just for writing but photos, videos, news articles, conversations I've had online, voice memos and a whole bunch of other things. Obviously the videos and voice recordings are not possible in the printed versions but they are all exported and backed up.
If anyone reading this is thinking of keeping a journal I can't recommend Day One enough! It is one of the few apps I don't mind paying the yearly subscription for which says a lot as I detest subscription apps generally.
Oh, stop, the vast majority of people of any generation don't write memoirs to be discovered in the first place.
What I suspect is most typical? - My grandfather on my dad's side was illiterate and my grandma (his wife) is barely literate, so I don't think she'd ever write down anything more than a grocery list.
Beyond that, if someone wants you to have/read something, they'd give it to you. If someone encrypts their writing or puts it behind a login, it's because they don't want you reading it.
Well that is not actually true for at-least 2 reasons
1. There are many things I do not want my family to access to today while I am alive, but wish them to have access to them if I were to die. My password vault as an example, they will need access to that to close my estate more easily
2. Many programs by default today have some kind of strong security, simply enabling this security by default to keep unwanted third parties out does not necessarily mean I want to also lock out my family. I many not want the PUBLIC reading it but that is different than not wanting family to read it. It also could be related to #1
You don’t log in as a dead person to close an estate (at least in traditional US financial institutions). There is a process specifically for this and having an account password isn’t helpful.
You assume that the only thing in the password vault is the password to the banking website? Which could not even be used to close my account even if I was the one requesting it
and/or you assume the only thing of value after a person is dead is the details of the financial institutions
both of which are flawed and erroneous assumptions
Legally, this is incorrect, all possessions are passed onto heirs when one dies, which includes papers/writings/recordings. Heir(s) become the new legal owner and may do whatever they wish with the documents.
It can arguably be morally questionable to read and/or publish some writings if the author wrote them with the intention of keeping them private forever. Of course, if the deceased doesn't tell you you'd have to guess. At the same time the person is dead so you can't exactly hurt their feelings, and presumably they knew the risk of writing something down is that we it might be read by the non-intended audience.
Though you can hurt the feelings of other people who know the deceased and/or have a vested interest in controlling their legacy. You might also hurt people who are the subject of those writings.
I think I understand what you mean though, with digital assets one can actually prevent private writings and thoughts from being read by others after death, if that's what the author actually desires, in a way you really can't do with physical assets. This is arguably good as it better honors the wishes of the deceased.
However, in this case this is a memoir, which are generally wrote to be read.
I'm with you though, I want my thoughts to die with me.
There’s a good and a bad in it. But a lot of good stuff came out from people who died, great stories, artworks and so on. Why would it not be a part of the cultural treasure?
it is only good if that was the intention of the descendant, unfortunately we as a culture do not properly plan for death there for I can see a huge amount of data being lost even if the descendant wished for their family to see the data. (or did not have a strong desire for data to die with them)
Yeah, I wonder how many people share their passwords with their loved ones while they’re good and healthy, but disaster can strike anytime. Im thinking of an idea for a service to ping one every 6 months and if no answer is given back in another 6 months, then to allow a designated person to have all pasawords and keys. Some kind of digital will executor or something of the sorts
My brother died unexpectedly in his 30s, after years living and studying in another country. Some things:
I hope we found every relevant friend and invited them to the funeral. But as he travelled a lot, they are all over the planet, and the chance we found them all is basically zero. The only reason we found out about his first serious girlfriend was because he told about her a week before on the phone.
We went to his country, hired a van, stuffed cleaned out his apartment, cancelled every service we found out, then went back home. We presume everything settled, but you have to know about a service to cancel it. I hope whoever hired his house did not get too much trouble with angry debtors and such.
We found out about sides of him we never knew about. There might be other things, we'll never know. This is very hard for my parents.
Some unscrupulous companies read obituaries and send a bill. Really. We had 2 companies billing him for services never delivered, just hoping the heirs would pay them.
We did not manage to enter his gmail account. Google did not grant us access even when presenting a death certificate. They suggested we contacted an USA judge, and required everything done according to USA law, even if everything relevant happened in the EU. I still feel bitter about their total lack of sympathy and cooperation.
I assume it depends upon the person. For me: If I am dead, why not. Our main purpose was followiup of whoever would mail him, just as would happen with physical letters.
We did in fact have access for a few hours by using his cell phone, for which he gave us the pin code. But moving the phone to another country triggerred some safety mode and Google wanted the full password.
Trouble with Google was: They agreed we had right for access. But their process was built with the assumption that only people in the USA could die.
Banking, Utilities, Retirement Info, Document Repository that has import info about my Assets and my will, Code repositories, Credentials to my home Servers that run the Home Automation, Media Center, etc etc etc...
All Kinds of things, I am 99% paperless at this point so all my info is digital...
These people never run into a real world scenario. I did and putting the pieces together is a frustrating experience which you never know if you will ever succeed. Eventually more generations will run into this and find a common path for these scenarios
My grandfather (from Czechia, cca years 1970-1990) kept daily notes of what he bought and did each day (he somewhat obsessively quantified himself before it was cool). I think these could be interesting to a historian, but they're written in pencil and kinda hard to read/decipher. I don't think technology is advanced enough for automated extraction yet.
if you don't plan to profit from it, you can just scan it and publish as is. If it is of interest for historians they will convert it into data themselves (if you are tech guy you can help them cooperate)
It most certainly is, give a junior machine learning enthousiast a week and I bet they could have the entire thing OCR'ed, if off-the-shelf tools don't work.
Jerry Pournelle used to talk about his personal log. He kept a day book and would write notes every day about conversations, meals, things he did, etc... I heard him talk about it on This Week in Tech a few times and for years I've wanted to do something like that. I've done it occasionally but have never been able to establish the habit.
I read a random letter from my grandfather recently. The most interesting part of it was how much mundane life updates were in it. Things that don't seem normative to communicate in written word anymore, because they're so transient they belong in a transient form, like a phone call. Letters felt much more like an ongoing spoken conversation.
My grandmother put together a collection of copies of old letters from families who had been in our hometown for several decades and gave it copies to all of her children.
As an HN user, when I die my notes might just disappear with me.
My family probably won't be able to log into my custom made blog. It will go on for a few years then the domain will expire.
My phone which gets unlocked with fingerprint or a 6 digit pin will remain locked forever. My computer, also with a secure password and encrypted hard drive will remain locked.
All my accounts with secure passwords will remain unreachable.
My dropbox which contains all my unpublished notes and books will probably expire and get deleted.
I'll have to print some instructions and lock them in a safe for my family.
I have been able to research multi-generations of my ancestry, and it's been amazing to say the least.
Emigration stories to America are really interesting. My Great-Great-Grandfather was tied to the ship's mast 2x for being a "bad" boy at 10 years old.
Another ancestor was one of the first martyrs of my church when a mob marched against them in Nauvoo. He deterred the mob at gunpoint 2x and was a marked man after that. He was later caught, beat and whipped to death.
I believe family history/geneology is very important, and we should be researching to see what was sacrificed on our behalf, and also documenting our own lives for our descendant's benefit.
In addition, there are multiple Family Search centers throughout the world that specialize in digitizing records, and assisting people with their geneology.
I have a lot of grandparents as users on https://www.dreamlist.com (a family wishlist site) and one of them requested an ability to preserve notes and family stories for loved ones. I am about to launch that feature in the next few days - it will work as a shared brain for families with text and audio recordings. I started working on it during the pandemic - everyone should be remembered. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in the same problem and want to talk (founder (at) dreamlist.com).
I interviewed Ray Kurzweil not long after "The Singularity Is Near" came out. I asked him about a concept that he brought up in the book but didn't get much attention in light of the other more startling predictions he made. Excerpt follows:
Q: In the Singularity is Near, you also discussed an intriguing invention, which you called the "Document Image and Storage Invention", or DAISI for short. But you concluded that it really wouldn't work out. Could you talk a little bit about that?
RK: ... The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge -- it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing. People say, "well, gee, if we could backup our brains and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn't live forever, in fact it doesn't live very long at all if you don't care about it if you don't continually update it to new formats.
Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. ...
Q: You said there's no technological solution. What about creating standards that would be maintained by the community, or would be widespread enough that future …
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
As a genealogist, I have thought a lot about solutions to preserve data long term that don't have physical limitations of microfiche or paper media, or the problem of computers crashing, subscriptions lapsing, or for-profit online services shutting down (see "Ancestry deleted 10 years of my family's history", https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/myfamily-shuttered-ance...)
Maybe 10 years ago, a few people in the Silicon Valley futurist community came up with the idea of a ball or disc etched with gradually smaller text an excerpt from the Old Testament, translated into multiple languages. It was kind of a Rosetta Stone ideal ... The plan was these balls/discs could be seeded across the world so even if there was some great calamity or the loss of written languages, future civilizations could resurrect them.
There are many limitations of applying this idea to genealogy or any written record, including cost and the inability to update the text.
It made me think that a more realistic solution to the genealogy preservation problem aligns with Kurzweil's "most primitive" take: Preserve core records on paper, share them widely with relatives and cousins, and use an easy-to-understand versioning system. This could also be applied to other family records, such as the grandfather's notes.
We know high quality paper can last hundreds of years. It can be easily copied and spread, potentially allowing the information to last thousands of years, as evidenced by Roman, Greek, and early Chinese dynastic records and literature that can still be read today.
> Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, so it's all the more impressive that Kurzweil is always wrong.
In 2001, the dominant OSes was Windows NT (still around), Apple was experimenting with BSD (experiment succeeded), and Linux was moving up fast (yup). The file formats were ASCII (still there), DOC 97 (still read by modern Microsoft), and PDF. Unicode support was still spotty, but it doesn't really matter because you can easily convert any known format from that time with iconv.
Why was Kurzweil so wrong? For the same reason he always is: simple minded extrapolation. Yes, if you took computer formats from before the 90s, they changed rapidly and quickly became unreadable. But that stopped happening as standards became solidified and (importantly) as billions of consumers started using the standards. There was a time when you could buy a computer with a strange byte size or that used EBCDIC instead of ASCII. But once there are a billion users for something, it's going to be supported effectively forever. The 8 bit byte and ASCII format are never going to be revisited until our civilization has collapsed because they are good enough. Why do we use the Roman alphabet instead of something better, like Hangul? Because the advantages of Hangul are not enough to override centuries of inertia.
"The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history." (https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/)
"For the production of nano inscribed nickel wafers or plates, the archival data in the form of pdf format is first submitted and organized sequentially or indexed systematically. After file conversion and other preparation for NanoRosetta processing, the documents or other data are then recorded onto a glass wafer by modulating a laser beam in a spiral or concentric manner using a polar raster direct laser etch. A matrix process in electroforming creates “father” nickel master from the inscribed glass wafer. An intermediate “mother” and final ”son” can then be generated from this nickel “father” master wafer. For mass production, polymer copies can also be provided in lieu of nickel “sons.” We also have the ability to combine digital data (CD or DVD) and analog human readable formats on the same disc." (https://nanorosetta.com/technology/)
.txt isn't a format - what size will the bytes/words be, what character encoding will they use (EBCDIC? ANSI? ASCII? Fixed width UTF-32?, variable width UTF8?, Next decade's AI-designed super-efficient encoding?) and what human language will they be encoding? Aramaic? Medieval French? As he said we keep using "standard formats" but the standards keep changing, and so does the world around it.
.txt doesn't address the content - something like tables of rainfall needs structure inside the text rather than runs of words. CSV? XML? Markdown or HTML tables? Audio, image, video, or more intricate things like a 3D model of a building?
And it doesn't address the hardware (that PDP tape drive), who has a laptop with an floppy, Iomega Zip, CD or DVD or Blu-Ray drive at all these days? What are you going to do with grandad's SSD with built-in encryption?
My mother committed suicide when I was a child. She kept a collection of journals, letters, writings, and various computer documents detailing her inner thoughts, bipolar disorder, specific medication schedule, ECT, and various medical records.
I should go through it someday. I know it’s probably a psychiatric students dream. A complete documentation of someone’s entire life, with associated medicine schedule (and eventually, ECT schedule). I imagine there’s some value to it.
I am soon the be a grandparent. I keep my missives and ponderings online but also archived. Perhaps not carved in stone for posterity but hopefully no more ephemeral than a physical notebook...
Nice story. I was hoping for some more "groundbreaking revelations." However, the opposite was the conclusion:
> he was a man like any other.
He had hopes and dreams. Triumphs and failures. Faith and doubt.
I write a lot of notes. I imagine there are some great takeaways in there. And sadly, I'm not very optimistic about those having any impact, especially if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. Mortality... Blah.
I know how you feel. I suspect the only way to get them to have impact is do something else great or become famous so that at some point someone even bothers to go through them. :)
Hehe, sometimes feels like that but we have family stories in my family about incredible things in people's lives. Even if your descendants only get one amazing story out of your life, it adds up when combined with all the other stories from other lives.
For just one example: one of my great great grandmother's was living in the desert and quick thinking when a son was hit in the face with an axe blade, stitched it up with her sewing kit and needle. He survived and recovered. Its just one story, but it's fun to tell in the family
From my father's address book (a DbaseII file that was last updated on December 15th 1992). This was a note associated with my contact info. Found on February 16, 2020.
Hi there, son. I doubt if anyone else will ever see these memos, but if anybody ever does, it will have to be you because you would be the only one with enough computer savy to dig them out. Hope you are doing well--and if I'm not still in this dimension when you see this--have a drink to your old dad's memory. Having you around gave me most of the pleasure in our family's growing up period! Live long and prosper...............