[ photo courtesy]

Nowadays who we are - or at least how others perceive us - is increasingly defined by our online identity.

Our own personal histories are recorded on our blogs, twitter feeds, flickr streams, youtube channels, facebook pages and the like. We can create and shape our personal record, to build up a picture of the life we lead and ultimately who we are.

Of course, this isn’t a new behaviour, since people have been recording diaries, family histories and photo albums for years - it’s just the technology that’s new, making it easier than ever to record our personal histories for posterity.

But it’s also allowed us to record the history of others who went before us - who weren’t able to leave their own personal records.

In the case of me and my family, I’m thinking of Yad Vashem, the foundation which documents the history the history of the Holocaust period and seeks to preserve the memory and story of its six million victims. They’ve set up a central database to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, which features the following quotation on its front page:

“…I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger”

David Berger in his last letter, Vilna 1941

It’s an attempt to reconstruct the names and stories of those who died in the Holocaust, featuring an estimated three million names. As such, building the database is a work in progress, which they’ve opened up to contributions from the public to help them build it further. Families and friends are encouraged to submit unrecorded names, and to add any further details to existing records so that their histories may be recorded.

Most of the Lindemann family was lucky enough to have been able to flee Nazi Germany, and it’s thanks to their escape that I’m here. My great great uncle Nathan was not so lucky, and was taken to a camp in Riga for the crime of being a Jew.

But thanks to the database at Yad Vashem, we’ve been able to add to Nathan Lindemann’s listing - submitting information about who he was in life, and uploading a photo to give a face to his record.

“When the Nazis rounded us up, they took away our names and gave us numbers. What we are doing here is taking away the numbers and giving them back their names.”

Arthur Kurzweil

It’s immensely pleasing that technology has allowed us to record his history so that his identity should be recorded for posterity, and that his memory may live on.

Our online identities aren’t who we are - they’re just one window into our personalities, and who we are in life may be very different from who we are online. But for those who aren’t able to record their own histories, an online identity is pretty bloody powerful.