“Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn...” as Rhett Butler says in response to wife Scarlett’s “Where shall I go? What shall I do?”.

In reality, she said “where shall it go, what shall I do to ensure my life’s family history work is passed on to future generations?”, having just presented Rhett with a long and epic tome detailing her father’s Irish Catholic origins and French ancestry on her maternal side, descending from her mother's old-money Robillard family in Savannah, Georgia.

What she needed was the online family archive platform WeAre.xyz, but more of that later.

It is an uncomfortable truth that relatives rarely share our fascination with ancestral roots. But we deeply want our discoveries and insights to at least be readily available to future generations, in full knowledge that there will be others like us.

By accident, my father uncovered his Great Grandfather’s Shropshire farm ledger and handed it to me (picture below: family group with my 2x Great Grandfather seated).

Unknown to anyone living, Thomas Poole (1835-1905) had written down 50 years of diary extracts halfway through the book. He prefaced them with the paragraph shown below, containing the spine tingling 123-year-old sentence “As some descendant in years to come may look them over & think about Old Farmers.”

“On Feb 3rd 1900 being kept in the house under the Doctor, with influenza, I have copied out in this Book some of the events that concerned me & my friends in a quick Farmers Life also the year and dates of them. As some descendant in years to come may look them over & think about Old Farmers.” Thomas Poole, Aston on Clun

By some miracle his record survived to reconnect with a future generation, but it could just as easily found the skip. I have now digitized and transcribed it within my family’s own online archive and intend it to be widely accessible for yet more ‘descendants in years to come.’ Feel free to take a look here:

1857-1894 Diary of Thomas Poole

WeAre.xyz… establishing my family’s archive

I am a technology entrepreneur/inventor, and an obsessed ‘drag-my-children-round-cemeteries’ genealogist. With some longstanding friends/colleagues we designed and developed WeAre.xyz, a visually delicious and enticing online family archive platform. All archive members experience themselves at the center of all the information (they are the tree home person, content from their ancestral families is prioritized (my paternal cousins have no interest in my maternal ancestry, still less that of my wife), and, crucially they can add content too.

Creating WeAre.xyz has been a delight. To be honest I have made all the tools I dreamed of having for myself :) You can knock yourself out with historic map overlays and 3D fly by maps, document transcriptions, image hotspot journeys…

Check out this video of my childhood town of Cambridge England, flying over an 1836 overlay map:

This video shows the power of image hotspots for bringing photos, past and present, to life:

Below is an example from our Royal Families of Europe demo archive. It shows the Magna Carta transcribed in its original Latin. You will find the English translation transcription there as well, along with the tragic tail of the murdered Romanovs, and gory head of Lady Jane Grey’s father:

Royal Families of Europe archive

But actually its all about you…

WeAre.xyz recognises and embraces the uncomfortable truth mentioned at the start of this post, and aims to maximize the chances of your research and family histories surviving and thriving, as well as being more engaging today.

There are actually three fundamental ways in which we have set out to achieve this:

1. Firstly, as described, each family member experiences themselves as the focal point of the family archive

2. Secondly, regardless of family history interest, your archive is a place in which your family can record and store their own personal nostalgia; childhood memories, raising the kids… and of course new memories as they happen (the future past).

3. And finally, THE most important thing you can do is create a fabulous record of yourself. As we fade away, the next generation comes searching for us. We can be the on ramp for those who will look back on us with nostalgia. We can make sure they avoid that painful cliche… “I wish I’d asked them more”.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or just fancy a chat; I love meeting and hearing about people’s lives and adventures in their ancestral pasts.

And you can find out more about our family archive builder here: WeAre.xyz

Warm wishes to all…

Simon