As we all know, the typical New Year’s resolution can be summed up like this: “Feel like a failure by February.”

This year, how about an achievable resolution you can feel good about the rest of your life — especially considering you’ll live longer if you keep it? If that sounds good, here’s a suggestion: Resolve to chart your family medical history — for your good and theirs.

This simply requires illuminating your own records with a medical history of your family tree, then securely archiving the results. You can set this resolution into motion through a few hours’ effort, and the results will be permanent and priceless.

Here’s how, starting with the step that’s most fun.

• Collect your family health history. Genetics play an enormous role in determining health risks and treatment. That’s why tens of thousands of scientists around the world are working to develop new insights on how to use this information to prevent, detect early and treat a host of diseases. Progress can be seen practically daily. Individual genomic mapping is already a reality, and someday — maybe pretty soon — widespread, affordable DNA testing will reveal insights to improve your health and even save your life. But until then, the collective memories of your extended family are the best source of information on what may be latent in your genetic code. Your physicians can use that knowledge to optimize your preventive care and, if you develop a health problem, to dramatically reduce the time it takes to diagnose and start treating it.

So resolve to be an anecdotal sleuth. What was great-grandpa’s physical and mental health like just before he died from “old age?” Any unusual health symptoms with aunts, uncles, cousins — including estranged, distant or otherwise unfamiliar relatives? Is there an unsolved medical mystery in the family closet? There probably is. I see examples every day.

One of our patients, a 12-year old boy, recently developed unusual abdominal symptoms. After ruling out the most common diagnoses, his primary-care physician sent him to a hematologist to review some potentially worrisome bloodwork results. But the bloodwork wasn’t reviewed in a vacuum. First, the hematologist did due diligence on the boy’s medical history, including the extended family’s. He learned that the mother suffered a rare anemia when she was about the boy’s age, but it was never fully diagnosed or understood. With that single clue, the physician focused immediately on an obscure but specific blood disorder that he knew to be hereditary. He not only diagnosed the young man’s condition but also finally solved the medical puzzle his mother had wondered about for 40 years.

We can’t learn from what we don’t know. Harvest your health history while toasting the New Year with the closest members of your gene pool. If you don’t, that irreproducible information might be lost forever. If you do, it’s also a good bet you’ll unearth some great stories.

•  Gather your records. Your medical history is likely spread out among specialists you’ve consulted over the years — also possibly spread out geographically if you’ve moved around — and your primary-care physician isn’t certain to have all the details. But referrals are probably noted in your chart, and a review of your calendar archives can help you fill in the blanks.