The following story comes to us from Ron Gines (president of Connexus, Inc., and his personal site) and was originally posted on Slashdot.org:

My mother passed away last month. She had been the family archivist for well over a decade already and had stacks of family history that had not been organized too much. To keep her “occupied” after my father’s death nearly 17 years prior, I suggested that she start putting the genealogy on a computer to help organize it.

Within the first year she had managed to put the existing 5,000 known family names in the database. Over the years she added to it, I put it on the web and from additional information from outside contributors and further research of my mothers, we now have over 35,000 names in our genealogical database.

She was extremely active in genealogy research and was therefore very active on-line. Fortunately, before she passed away I knew her passwords for her computer (… well I built it and she never changed that one). I also knew most of her on-line passwords … or was able to guess it.

I started wondering about this almost 10 years ago when, in the early days of the web, I hadheard about the Brink family web site. I went there once and thought that there was some interesting information that would tie into our research. When I tried to go back later, the site was gone. I have never been able to find it and there is no sign of it that I can find in the Wayback Machine. So I am afraid that much of that information is probably lost to me forever.
I have always known that I would carry on the database and information as I could after my mothers death (assuming that I would out live her). My next concern is how do I keep this alive after my death. I have not figured out an answer to that.