In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of personal information (that is, information which relates specifically to an individual or household, or which has been created by them) stored and managed within the home. And as the home is increasingly incorporated into electronic networks, so the potential increases for personal information to be distributed, and readily accessible even if accommodated elsewhere. Personal information-in the form on documents, photographs, records-is an important reference point for each of us: it is critical to our sense of who we are, as well as to our relationships with those who are close to us. Personal information enables us to remember and understand the past, is essential to our 'life administration' and preserves in recorded form aspects of our identity, experiences, knowledge, assets and relationships. Yet technological change is undoubtedly a force which is reshaping our relationship to our personal information. As our everyday living environments become more informationally complex and congested, we must continue to make ourselves at home in them. There is therefore a need for more and more sophisticated methods for maintaining our sense of control and orientation. Techniques of management and organisation, as well as the technologies which mediate our relationship to information, need to give us a sense that there is a structure within which neither we nor our personal information will be 'lost'. This paper illustrates ways in which information that previously belonged to us is progressively being alienated, for example through the shift from human-readable formats to the use of storage media which require the use of mediating technologies, as is the case with digital photographs. But it also describes how the converse can also be true, and there are possibilities for the reappropriation of personal information. As personal information previously locked in public records goes online, for example in the Australian War Memorial collections, links with the past are made accessible and information is effectively given back to people.