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At the end of each year genealogists assess what we have accomplished in the past year, and make a list of tasks we want to accomplish in the New Year.

Source: Wikipedia

Here is my top suggestion for your 2015 New Year's Genealogy Resolutions list.

#1. Put Your Family History Online

Use the large online family tree sites – FamilySearch, Ancestry or MyHeritage – as your key method for centralizing, preserving and distributing your family tree. Be sure to include copies of your old family photos, documents and stories.

By doing this your data will be backed up in real time on multiple sites, each of which is readily available to other genealogists – worldwide. And all this in real time. Amazing.

Now all of your research – from your core, carefully documented family tree to your notes on countless other individuals – can be stored like jigsaw pieces, easily retrievable by every other genealogist working on solving the massive jigsaw puzzle of the combined genealogy of mankind.

Did we ever think that this scale of joint activity was possible?

If the Guinness Book of World Records judges stepped back and realized what is happening, they'd see that this massive online effort is the largest joint project ever undertaken – by hundreds of millions of genealogists, on a global scale – worked on for decades and projected to take decades more to be completed.

And we are each key players.

Genealogists want to compile, preserve and pass down their family history to future generations. The bottom line is that if it's not online, our research will simply not be found by the rising generation.

We have each been researching our family trees for three years, five years – or much longer. We have examined each relative, gathered the facts, and added each person to our tree. Over time, each genealogist easily organizes and documents 50k, 100k or more linked members of their family. Along the way we've gathered and examined information on thousands more individuals that we "know" are relatives – but we're not quite sure exactly how.

So we sort them and file away our notes on each of them into folders, archiving them in our home as we continue to search out more details and connections. This approach is so Old School – Retro – so behind the curve of what we can be doing with today's tools.

"The Cloud" is the new standard and, importantly, it is the standard that the family historians of tomorrow will rely on.

You print your family history and give the family copies every year.

Isn't that good enough?

This is terrific – and you should keep doing it.

In fact you should adopt me – and continue researching and publishing about my side of the family tree.

But let's consider how and where you are distributing copies of your findings.

Are you handing out physical copies only to your known relatives?

Will you place copies in libraries?

Experience has likely taught you that not everyone in a family is interested in actively working on the family history. So we have to distribute enough copies so that future persons will find it and build on the work we have done.

The "physical" copy approach has worked well for centuries. Small, compact – and if future family historians find a copy, you have passed down the information. But if you don't make that connection, it's as if your work never existed.

How have we improved on that delivery, preservation and distribution method?

In the recent past we used microfilm.

That had been a giant leap forward.

While not as satisfying as using the originals, books, records and documents in large quantities were easily and inexpensively copied to this new format and distributed around the world – a clear game changer for family history.

And now we have "The Cloud" – the next level of storage and distribution.

Resolve now to write this down as your first New Year's Genealogy Resolution: Put all of your family history information – the names, dates, places, photos, documents and stories – online. Preserve your work in real time, backed up and completely searchable – and discoverable.