I’ve been working on family genealogy the past five years. What I would give to have old family documents, letters, and photos today! Even from my folks and grandparents.
Somehow you’d have to incentivize multiple succeeding generations to hold onto the stuff and then, somewhere down the road, hope that one of your children, grandchildren, gr-grandchildren, gr-gr-grandchildren, etc. becomes interested in who they are and where they came from. They they would have that treasure trove of family info.
And in this digital age it just gets less likely. Best case scenario really is that somebody scans them all and put them in the cloud somewhere. Of course somebody still has to keep the password and move them to another cloud or something.
One of my aunts is really into genealogy. It was interesting stuff to read once. But I’ve never really seen the attraction. I’m much more about who I became than what I came from. Maybe because I chose a vastly different path than either parent, that separation matters to me. But even people I know, and various stories I see. The post boom generations just aren’t into baggage.