Building My Bridge to 2076: Episode 6
Documenting the creation of a family Century Safe, one decision at a time
About “Building My Bridge to 2076”
On December 31, 2026, I’ll seal a Century Safe containing letters, photos, stories and artifacts from my family to be opened fifty years later in 2076.
This series documents the entire nine-month journey from vision to gathering to curation to the closing ceremony. I’m following the Century Safe Method I developed while researching Annie Diehm, a Civil War widow who sealed a safe in 1879 that sat all but forgotten for decades, but was opened by President Gerald Ford in 1976, just as Annie had planned. This is Episode 6 of 23.
Thanks for joining me on this journey, and I look forward to sharing the stories of the Century Safes you’re building over the next months, as well!
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Release Date: May 28, 2026
The long haul
These past two weeks I’ve come to appreciate why Annie Deihm took an entire year – and then three-plus more, to get her Century Safe finished. As I wrote in the Century Safe Method, this is not a weekend project.
In addition to juggling my normal projects, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new collection of family history writing guides and resources, you can read more about them here, and getting the house ready for summer while simultaneously preparing for a short holiday before said summer fills up. My kids and grands have been in the throes of end-of-the-year track and field days and recorder concerts, plays, presentations and the inevitable summer birthday birthday parties planned for those kids unlucky enough to be born when school is out. Oh, and an international move. In other words: Life. A lot of it, and almost all of it wonderful.
It’s not really known what all Annie was doing during the building of her Century Safe between 1876 and 1879. We know she was publishing The United States Centennial Welcome out of her office at 27 Union Square in New York City, and managing at least a small staff as well as a stable of outside contributors. In one issue of the Welcome alone, a dozen or more different names appear alongside or under articles. She was a publishing house and business owner.
For much of the year, Annie was also manning a booth at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia – promoting her publications and the Century Safe, but also encouraging tens of thousands of the exposition’s nearly ten million visitors to take a few minutes and sign their names in one of her albums. A PR queen.
Annie was also hustler. A networker before there was a name for it. She secured funding for the safe itself from Peter Cooper, one of the great renaissance men of his time who was, at the time, running his own presidential campaign. And she secured photographs from Mathew Brady, a guy who’d seen his share of ups and downs by then, but today is considered one of America’s most influential early photographers. If you’ve ever watched a Civil War documentary, it’s likely you’ve seen Mathew’s vivid and sometimes shocking battlefield images. Annie didn’t include those in her safe, but she did include hundreds of Mathew’s photos of political, business and military leaders in her massive “Photographs of Great American People” album – a leather-bound tome the size of an over-stuffed carryon.
And on the side, she was sending out packets of pages from autograph albums, soliciting participation from mayors and industrialists and government workers and ordinary Americans from all thirty-eight states and ten organized territories, and negotiating with carriers to ship those packets free of charge. Both ways, likely in exchange for advertising space in current and future publications within her growing publishing empire.
It’s easy to forget, or at least overlook, that Annie was also a single mother. Raising two daughters who’d lost their father and two of their siblings when they themselves were just little girls. In 1876, Sarah was 21 and Clara just 15. Records have been hard to find for both. It’s possible Sarah was already married and out of the house by 1876, but seems likely Clara was still under Annie’s care; she didn’t marry until 1883. By then, sadly, Sarah had already passed away. She was just 22. Adding to the grief Annie had been carrying and adding to since Charles’ death twenty years earlier.
Yet she stuck with it. She soldiered through. She faced down critics – probably including the ones in her own head, if my experience is anything to go by – and she stayed committed to the idea of building a bridge to 1976 through it all. To the end.
I think about that on the days when I look at what’s been done and what needs done, when I feel the pressure inherent in doing this in real time. When I get pushback or silence or apathy.
This isn’t a weekend project. I’m in it for the long haul.
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The Letters to 2076 ask
My contribution tracking spreadsheet is up and running and has gained a few entries, not many but a few. This week, I’m sending out the PDF of topics and prompts I’ve created to help family members write their Letters to 2076.
The longer I’m with this project, the more I realize how important those letters are – whether that’s a simple, “here’s what a normal day looks like to me” or something more substantial.
I keep coming back to the way I would react to knowing – or maybe even just learning – that one of my ancestors cared enough about me fifty years ago, that an ancestor wanted me to know who they were so deeply, that they took the time to write and then set aside letters to me. Someone they never even knew but believed would care.
I want to be that person, and as this project has rolled along, I think others have gained that desire, too. I hear it in my son’s voice when we’re talking. And, in a different way, in the voices of my grands who maybe don’t yet have the ability to understand the pull of time, but nonetheless crave the connection.
Because that’s what this is about. Bridges across time and generations. The ones we’re building with this Century Safe, and the ones we’re building to the future us.
This Letter to 2076 is found in Section 3: This Moment in Time, and the topic is: What 2026 is Like.
When I was brainstorming topics for these letters, I spent a lot of time going back through my own journals and personal writings to see what kinds of things I wrote to myself about over the last sixty-odd years, but also, going back to that core concept, what I’d want to know about my great-great grandparents, none of whom I ever got to meet.
“What matters?” is the question I kept asking. “What stands the test of time”?
Or in the parlance of the snarky newspapermen in 1976, what would the future us find “interesting and important”?
I think this topic fits the bill. When I’m looking through old documents, records or newspapers, and something grabs my attention and I often wonder: Did Johann worry about this? Did Reke know this was happening outside her little world? How did Caroline, a widowed midwife responsible for her family’s survival, react to this news?
What did my sixteen German-born great-great grandparents think of the America they came to and then melted into? Not in the past as I know it, but in their present?
Here are a couple of the questions, the prompts included to prime the pump for this question:
What’s happening in the world right now? What’s everyone talking about? What feels important or urgent?
And the reminder:
Don’t just list news headlines. Tell them what it feels like to be alive right now.
And finally, a little snippet of the Letter to 2076 on this topic I’ll be sending on to the future:
…A few weeks ago the American president, Donald J. Trump, started releasing huge batches of previously classified documents, audio and video recordings having to do with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). We used to call them UFOs, Unidentified Flying Objects, and before that, at least in popular culture, they were just Flying Saucers. I don’t know what you’ll call them in 2076. Maybe just obsolete transportation.
Anyway, people are losing their minds.
For as long as I can remember, there have been people who believe that aliens from outer space live among us, or have at least visited. I remember doing a research paper on UFOs in maybe fifth grade — so 1972 or so, and finding references to what some people saw as alien invaders mentioned in the bible and pretty consistently ever since. Proof? I don’t know.
History also records people believing in sea monsters, and fairies and Yeti.
Like anything that has to do with the government - at least in my present - some people think it’s all a huge conspiracy - that the US government has been hiding the truth from Americans, so dumping these documents is seen as sort of an answer to that charge.
But here’s the thing. People are seeing what they want to see in these documents and recordings. If you believe in UFOs these are proof the government has been covering up their existence up all along. And if you don’t believe in them, these are proof the whole things is a figment of mass imagination at best, or an elaborate hoax at worst.
There’s a lesson in there.
As for me. UFOs scare the bejesus out of me. No seriously.
In 1977, a movie called, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” came out. I was 15 at the time and saw it at the movie theatre with my then boyfriend. I was so scared that I refused to walk out into the dark night! (check whatever archives are available in your present, there might be a copy out there somewhere, of the movie, not me being a chicken!)
There’s a man named Elon Musk (look him up in the archives, too) who wants to colonize Mars some day. He’s a genius and a doer, and he thinks it’s possible. Maybe by the time you read this it will be. I think that would be cool. Which is sort of weird, right? The thought of us and our rockets or whatever exploring new universes isn’t scary to me at all. But the reverse still gives me nightmares. Even at 64…
For a lot of us, writing letters is a thing of the past. I remember learning how to write letters in elementary school as part of our writing curriculum. We even walked down to the post office to mail them.
I used to write my grandparents letters between visits as a kid, and as a teen I kept up correspondence with a best friend who’d moved away. Somewhere in a box I still have a packet of letters my first boyfriend sent me from basketball camp one summer, and another packet of letters my best guy friend sent me while we were attending different colleges. Those, as I recall, have some less than awesome doodles on the envelopes.
And, in the upstairs closet I have three year’s worth of letters my dad and his mom passed back and forth while Dad was in the Navy. And yes, some have been transcribed, and all have been digitized and are properly stores.
But people don’t write letters anymore. Or at least not most people. An occasional postcard while on vacation maybe, but even that’s more of a souvenir than a conversation.
Writing these Letters to 2076 has reminded me how much fun letter writing is. How personal and thoughtful. How permanent. Knowing these letters will be around long after I’m dead - by intent not just a wish and a prayer - somehow makes them easier to write.
I’m hoping my family has the same experience.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
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It’s always fun to sit down with Barbara at Projectkin, and last month I had the chance to share some of what I’ve learned about time capsules with her and the Projectkin community.
Recently I was invited to join Robin Stewart and the GenClub Panel to talk about Annie Deihm and her Century Safe. It was a fabulous conversation and a great format for in-depth discussions and questions.
The Story Catalog isn’t an archive in the usual sense. What you’ll find here is a living catalog of Lost & Found Stories – deeply researched historical narratives told in parts, discovered through newspapers, letters, court records, logs, and the stubborn human habit of leaving traces behind.
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I love this project and admire you for trying to be like Annie by focusing on the future.