Some of them hunted for gold, others worked in mills, still others left their homelands to make a new life in America. Well, you would become a family history detective. You would look for clues to their lives in the things they left behind. You'd use records, photographs, witnesses, artifacts anything you could get your hands on that would tell you more about them. While there are many sources that can tell you more about how a person lived or where an event happened, one of the most helpful sources is records.
Records are simply written details about a life event.
But records are fragile. AT RISK explores the way the records can be destroyed and looks at the heroic efforts by many people around the world who are working to preserve them. You'll see how records are kept and stored through microfilming efforts at the National Archives. You'll meet a Russian genealogist who is trying to reconstruct genealogies destroyed in the Bolshevik Revolution and visit the Shoah Visual History Foundation, where the memories of Holocaust survivors are being preserved. Historically, governments have destroyed records.