A great idea for an article hit me while I was changing terminals at the Memphis Airport. Unfortunately, by the time I got something out on which I could record the idea for later, it was too late. It was gone. The greatest genealogy tip ever lost for good.

You are not the newspaper of record, either. How many of us have parts of our genealogical information recorded only in our minds? Did we make assumptions about a date, a place, or an event and fail to record those assumptions in our notes? Did we reach a conclusion from a series of documents and fail to record our reasoning in our notes? There is always the chance that our assumption or line of reasoning was incorrect and if we fail to note such in our records it sometimes is difficult to see where facts left off and "concluding" began.

And what information is still resident only in the minds of living family members? Traditions, stories, the identities of people in old pictures, the reason Grandpa moved to Kansas, and other bits of family lore may exist only in the depths of someone's mind? Have you taken the time to record that information in a more permanent format? If you don't, it too could be lost forever, much like my "greatest genealogy tip of all time" is floating somewhere around the Memphis airport. Hopefully it won't interfere with airplane navigation.

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