The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/ClayGirl84 on 2025-02-05 22:21:55.
Hi Everyone,
I just lost my Mother unexpectedly back on January 26th, 2025. She and I shared the family house together as we took care of my Father through a Traumatic Brain Injury, Brain Surgery, Dementia, and eventually a final diagnosis of Parkinson’s. I took care of him at home all the way through hospice. Most likely the Parkinson’s caused the fall that caused the Traumatic Brain Injury. So I have spent my entire life in my childhood home with my parents, who happened to be slightly older than the average couple when my older brothers and I came into being. My father had been out of the workforce for 8 years before he passed and honestly he never had much of a digital, online presence. Not that he was a troglodyte, in fact date night in the earlier days of their marriage and when we were tots; was building and upgrading our first family computer. Both my parents even with their slightly older and my friends’ parents adored technology. My Dad got in on the ground floor with the University in one area and my Mother unknowingly at the time was at the same university and helped with the digitization of the entire university library and helped with the interlibrary network too, that went from university to university.
So when they married, my Dad knew when my Mom finally finished her second Masters and would absolutely go on to her PhD that she was going to need a machine that could handle her chosen field of geology and environmental studies/engineering. So they built the family computer to to handle the advanced computations at the time, and to speak with the university mainframe to run at night when people were allowed to have access to large data crunching machines and machines that would run written programs that they simply had to invent (and were able to scientifically prove later on). This was all the 1980s and 1990s.
All of this being said. My father didn’t have a digital presence to remember him by. And that saddened me as we had few pictures of him too. He and Mom mostly took the pictures, but tapered off as we grew up. I know my Mom was on Facebook and possibly other social networking sites. What I wasn’t aware of until a colleague of her’s showed me yesterday that on YouTube there are quite a few interviews of her, acceptance speeches for scientific/environmental awards, lectures, community outreach meetings and more.
I’m not asking anyone here to do the work, but I deeply want to archive all of this data before these videos are lost. And I didn’t know she had used social networking systems for work/research and sweetly used Facebook as a public online journal. I have found stories from her about her life before us kids, I have found family stories and extended family stories, and even her recipes. I desperately want to capture all of that information. I know it will be a great deal of indexing and tagging entries, but I don’t want to lose even more of her, than my sometimes sieve like mind does to me.
Can someone point me in the right direction of a spreadsheet or flowchart that will walk me through how to save all of this information?
Thank you for your time. She was amazing and I was so thankful to find out that I’ll still get to see her and hear her voice. She had a brilliant mind (they both did). This just hurts so much. I lost my Mom and my Friend.
Thank You, ClayGirl84
TL;DR - I want to capture my Mom’s digital life before it is gone, what pre set up worksheets/workflow charts/spreadsheets are there that I can follow? I read through all the subreddit rules and fyi, and googled my question. Best lead was you all. Also thank you for what you do; especially recently it is deeply appreciated.