[bkohlmann]

I'm struck by the patchwork of historical references it took to track this mans life. Given our digital footprints today, will historians have an easier time of tracking folks, or will our digital messages be in some strange lockup as digital storage evolves? Will they mine a centuries old Facebook to analyze our lives?

[coldcode]

The corollary is that back then it was also easier to vanish. Today you can find almost anyone. In the long run though I wonder if future historians will have a more difficult time finding obscure people since the electronic records may have vanished whereas paper and books can survive for hundreds of years. It amazing to me you can see the person's birth notice.

[goodcanadian]

I imagine that electronic records will suffer a similar fate as paper records. Many will survive and many won't. To respond to the grandparent, there are many more records, so you may be able to track some individuals with far greater level of detail, but the noise is also a lot higher. When googling my name, for example, I don't show up at all in the first several pages of results, so it may be a lot harder for a random researcher to sort through the data to learn about me if, for some reason, they wanted to.