Have You Ever Seen a Hearse Pulling a Moving Trailer?

The Complete Guide to Future-Proofing Your Family History

De: Thomas MacEntee

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Have you ever seen a hearse pulling a moving trailer? Of course not. Because you can't take it with you — not your money, not your home, and not the decades of irreplaceable family history research sitting in your binders, hard drives, and online accounts right now.

Every day, genealogy collections built over twenty, thirty, even forty years disappear. Not from fires or floods — from no plan. A researcher passes away. Family members, grieving and overwhelmed, see boxes of photocopied records and shelves of local history books. They don't see a lifetime of work. They see clutter. Within days, it's gone. Your family history doesn't have to end that way.

The Only Complete Guide to Future-Proofing Your Family History

Written by genealogy educator and speaker Thomas MacEntee, Have You Ever Seen a Hearse Pulling a Moving Trailer? is the book the genealogy community has needed for years. Not another guide to building your family tree — the definitive guide to making sure your family tree survives you.

This is legacy planning meets genealogy: a practical, warm, and often funny roadmap that takes you from "I know I should do something about this" to "I have a plan, and I feel good about it."

What You'll Learn

• Why inaction is the biggest threat to your collection — real stories of genealogy research lost to estate sales, digital evaporation, and the slow fade of neglect.
• How to treat your research as generational wealth — your family tree carries cultural identity, medical heritage, and emotional legacy far beyond your lifetime. Learn to pass that inheritance on intentionally.
• Practical succession planning, step by step — identify successors, document your system, and create a "README" for your collection so the next custodian can actually use it.
• Digital legacy planning for genealogists — passwords, cloud accounts, DNA results, and online family trees. Includes the 3-2-1 backup rule every family historian must know.
• How to work with libraries, archives, and genealogical societies — what repositories actually want, how to match your collection to the right institution, and how to navigate donation gracefully.
• AI tools, scanning, and technology — digitize and preserve your collection without being a tech expert, with ready-to-use AI prompts for ChatGPT and Claude.
• Legal considerations in plain language — copyright, wills, deeds of gift, digital estate planning, and privacy, with the right questions for your estate attorney.

A Complete Preservation Toolkit

Every chapter includes checklists and expert tips. The appendices deliver a Digital Assets Checklist, Repository Selection Worksheet, Inherited Collection Assessment, a Sample Letter of Instruction for your estate plan, a decision tree, and a glossary — everything you need to start protecting your research today.

This Book Is for You If…

You're an active genealogist who hasn't planned for your collection's future. You've inherited someone else's research and don't know where to start. You want to build your family history with long-term preservation in mind from day one. Or you simply want to make sure the stories you've spent years preserving outlast you.

You've worked too hard on your family history to let it disappear in four days. Preserving family stories is an act of love — for the ancestors you found, and for the descendants who will someday want to find them.

Get your legacy plan started today. Your future family is counting on you.