The paperwork

[Donald66]

As we progress in our journey towards citiizenship we've probably all gathered large amounts of paper research.

My question: What to we do with it now?

I've gotten the suggestion to scan all of the documents onto my laptop & discard the paper.

Any other thoughts?

[uwlaw]

Box it up and put it in the attic, if nothing else. You never know when one of your descendents or relatives may need it for a completely different purpose. It's difficult to tell now what may be useful to someone else in the future. One of my grandparents did exactly that with a document they certainly thought they would never need again. It turned out to be critical in my own application for citizenship.

And while its easy to think that documents scanned today will always be available, ask yourself how useful it would be today if someone placed a bunch of data onto a 5.25-inch disk about 20 years ago using a program that was the industry leader back then but is unknown now.

[Drew927]

I plan on keeping the paper for the same reason uwlaw suggests.
But I am also backing everything up on a usb flash drive.

[ForzaItaliaPgh]

I'd keep it. It is a genealogical treasure trove, someone in the future may want to assemble a complete set of records (like I am eventually planning on doing) of your family and what you already have will be a great aide to them. The USB is a good idea, but still you ought to keep the paper, just think about if this was a couple yrs ago, you'd be saving everything on a floppy disk and wouldn't be able to find a machine to read the thing! 10 yrs from now you probably won't be able to find a computer that reads flash drives.

[sceaminmonkey]

keep them! had most of our grandparents and great grandparents kept originals................ I would be less stressed ! also after completing the process I now understand what a treasure these really are. Finding all this information is so rewarding.

[sceaminmonkey]

keep them! had most of our grandparents and great grandparents kept originals................ I would be less stressed ! also after completing the process I now understand what a treasure these really are. Finding all this information is so rewarding.