Will, A word of caution. A few years ago I was tasked with collating and storing all company records which, because of the nature of the business, had to be kept for a minimum of 80 years.

During this work I had a long meeting with a Kodak rep. The upshot of which was that he couldn't guarantee that digital photographs of the files could be kept for such a period.

However microfiche could be kept, or so it was calculated for 500 years.

Hopefully your record of the village will at some point be made available publically. So my advice would be stick to film and an SLR

Cheers