My experience doing this, granted two generations removed and all information existing before the digital era, was predicated on access to local, university, an

My experience doing this, granted two generations removed and all information existing before the digital era, was predicated on access to local, university, and church libraries/librarians. If you can get a hard document into the preserved record, at a university, library, church, newspaper, etc you can have some assurance that humans for the next century will do their best to try and preserve it. For example, the original copy of my grandfather's graduate thesis which is partially handwritten (the rest by typewriter - what isn't typed was done before typesetting was available to the average midwestern grad student in the 40s) is in a university library, and was digitally cataloged about 15 years ago. I have a bound copy that I got by contacting the librarians there and plan to give as a holiday gift to all of his children (my dad, his siblings). Similarly, my grandmother kept detailed records of her local music clubs' meetings, including annotated program notes and scores. We found these by combing through six decades of scores that she'd kept in boxes in her basement (thank god there was never a flood or fire). I told my brother and sister that they should keep hard copies of their writings around, and duplicates in safe deposit boxes or similar document storage for their kids/grandkids if they exist. At the end of the day you need to trust institutions that will preserve information longer than a generation or two, which are libraries and banks. One area that may not be obviously interesting is that your local community probably has a library and probably does not have much detailed published information on its history. And you probably have a local history society made up of volunteers. These organizations will last longer than you or I and you can trust if you publish something they care about (a local history, catalog of people, yourself, your neighbors, etc) those documents will long outlast you. We think of paper as being cheap and easily destroyed, but paper documents often survive centuries. As long as there are people to keep it safe it will be around.