Inspired by this thread, I thought I’d expand on my comments, but didn’t want to hijack that thread, hence this one.
A little background: I am an atheist. I try very hard not to proselytize, as I find that less than helpful no matter where you stand. It’s just important that you know.
My grandfather was a religious leader. He preached at five churches during his career. When he died, he left a room full of books & papers. Nobody in the family wanted any of the materials. There aren’t many of us left in any case. Digressing, sorry. Anyway, I wanted to honor his life & beliefs & work. It just did not seem the right thing to do to burn it all. I thought I’d use the whole situation as an excuse to reach out to his world & see what would happen.
Every time he left a church, they would give him a photograph of the church as a keepsake. Except the earliest one, which was a painting. He had these all hung in a hallway of his home for the remainder of his life, so, clearly, they meant something to him. I tracked down postal addresses for each church & mailed them all back with a letter of explanation. Want to guess how many replies I got from the five churches? Exactly one… and it was a very quick, “thank you”.
He was on a few town councils. During his time, he accumulated drawings of proposed new city buildings, a new post office and so forth. I located addresses for local history museums for each town & mailed piles of records to each one. Of the five museums, I heard from not a single one.
He had a few yearbooks from the 1920s, when he was in school. These were signed by the professors. I found the schools & mailed them to the schools’ archivists. Not a single reply.
— and that’s roughly where things sat for 20 years or so… But, having moved and feeling older myself, trying to get rid of things more than accumulate things… I have revisited his archives again recently…
In 1968, he was the person nominally in charge of the construction of a new church building. He chaired the various committees, wrote the checks, and so forth. He collected a large amount of paperwork related to that project. Well, that church is now (very nearly) 50 years old. So, I reached out to them - twice now - offering to loan his documents to them for display if they were planning to do anything interesting for their 50th year. No replies.
I have all of the business records of all of the churches. I would’ve gladly returned them. Other relatives have suggested burning them. But, I think I’ll probably send them to a local historical society. Never mind if they don’t write back to me. At least there, they will be (in theory at least) available to the public rather than in a trash fire.
I still have approximately 2000 sermons. No idea what to do with them all. The churches don’t want them, apparently. The relatives didn’t want them 20 years ago. I don’t have any use for them. But, it feels so strange considering torching the lot of them. I don’t know if you’ve taken anyone you really care about out of your address book. Maybe, these days, deleting their number out of your cell phone. But, there’s a weird finality to it.
I remember being at his retirement dinner. This is a true story. Towards the end, he addressed the group & asked, “Does anyone know what to do with 2000 sermons?” Everyone laughed. His solution was to just leave them on a shelf. I don’t know yet what my solution will be… But, if you have any suggestions…
2,000? Yikes. Are you willing to put in the labor, maybe just half an hour a day, to scan them? Once in digital form, they’re a lot easier to archive. (Easy to erase or lose, also, but you can store them in multiple locations…)
Nobody in the church hierarchy is willing to take them? Go up a level, to state or regional church headquarters? Maybe contact a college or university, particularly a religious one?
I hope you find a good home for them. Posterity will thank you!
Classmates.com may be interested in the yearbooks. They copy the books and make them available online. May not help you because they send them back after copying them.
With no disrespect to your granddad and his considerable body of work …
Per Fast Facts about American Religion there are very roughly 350,000 churches in the US. Which means roughly 350,000 sermons are created and delivered weekly. Larger churches may do several per day times several days a week. The supply of sermons is ginormous.
Like anything else in our large country, the lifework of a man is a huge achievement for that man but a mere grain of sand on the beach compared to the lifework of us all. Which means that its value is great to the man, middling to his immediate circle, and meaningless to the rest of us. Harsh but true.
The sole exception is in cases of notoriety. Which may or may not be well-deserved. More of that stuff gets preserved by and for interested people.
My grandfather was a painter who achieved minor fame in his city for his iconic work over decades. At his death many years ago we gathered the couple hundred (!) paintings in his home and held a gallery showing downtown not far from where his studio had been. With appropriate advertising in the art press & word of mouth. We got a lot of traffic but sold only a few despite rather knock-down prices.
It was a cold and empty feeling packing up the remainder to bring home and do ??? with.
I get it, I truly do. Perhaps you can find a few that are especially well done to keep as your personal monument to his intellect and his skill. The rest are, sadly, dross for the fire.
Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. It applies to more than just a man. It applies to his works as well.
You could put the sermons in some sort of long-lasting, water-tight container, dig a deepish hole some stable location (rent an auger) and bury them. Give yourself the possibility that they will be accidentally dug up hundreds of years from now and reach historians interested in the ancient 20th century where the vast majority of those hundreds of thousands of other sermons have turned to dust.
To be honest many of us are having trouble dealing with all the things collected by our grandparents. People who grew up back then kept nearly everything but what to do with them now?
Sadly grandpas WW2 uniform will probably go into the trash.
Sigh… Yeah, that happened. We tossed pop’s WWII uniform. But I did keep the patches, to put in a little shadow-box.
(Funny: when I used a seam-ripper to get the patch off the sleeve, I found, embroidered on the back side of the patch, the name of the seamstress who had created it! First time that had seen the light of day in 50 years!)
2000 sermons should be properly recycled, please don’t just toss them or torch them. If you really think anything on them need extra destruction, there are places that crosscut shred and then recycle but I doubt such old sermons need any extra treatment then a run to the local recycling center.
When I come across them cheap (say a couple bucks to five maybe) a volume I have bought bound collections of sermons; mostly pre-Civil War (and some way pre) and mostly from famous ministers or churches. They do make fun reading and give some insight on some of the thoughts during different eras. Usually after I read through them I pass them along for some charity book sale and forget them. I have followed up at some of the sales and they do go but I got a feeling over time most end up recycled or in some landfill. But from a basic pastor from somewhere, his personal notes and copies? Those I have an idea may go straight to recycle.
Were they mine at the moment I would maybe reach out to other pastors/ministers from that denomination or geographic area. I am surprised at the amazingly mundane (to me) things someone from a neighboring church (neighboring one I belong to) find fascinating. One of the ministers from one of towns involved with your grandfather could be much the same way. I would also contact the regional offices of his denomination. We Lutherans call the “Synods” but most denominations have something along those lines. If they don’t want them they may know a pastor/minister or lay person who would.
Funny how something that was important to one generation can become a burden to another. My maternal grandmother had a set of 4 vases from the Franklin Mint, and after she died, my mom gave one to each of 4 sibs. So I’ve got one sitting on a shelf (criminy, I’ve had it for over 20 years!) and I don’t know what to do with it.
It’s not of a style I’d have chosen, I don’t recall ever seeing it at my grandmother’s house, so she must have gotten it after I moved away and didn’t visit weekly any longer. I offered it to my daughter, but she doesn’t want it. Nor do any of my sibs. Yet I don’t feel like I can just sell it or give it away. So it sits on a shelf, moved occasionally when I dust.
Moral of the story - do your heirs a favor and get rid of your own stuff before you die. I’ve already started by throwing away old photos that mean nothing to anyone and very little to me.
Email your state archives. Even if they are not prepared to take them, they will almost certainly be able to point you towards the local archives, libraries or historical societies that would be most likely to accept them. Alternatively, approach his old college. Or work out whether his denomination has a central archive.
The key thing is to find an institution with an existing archive or ‘special’ collection. It is unsurprising that his old churches were uninterested, as they almost certainly won’t have the facilities to do anything other than dump them in a cupboard and forget about them. Whereas for a large library or archive with significant holdings of other manuscripts, it would be just another collection. If they have the space, they probably wouldn’t even make a judgement on whether the sermons are ‘interesting’ or ‘important’.
Would anyone ever consult them? No, probably not. But at least they would be there if anyone was interested. It would not be inconceivable that many years in the future someone was researching, say, styles of preaching in twentieth-century America. Such a researcher might find them interesting precisely because your grandfather was not notable. A more famous preacher would arguably be less typical.
But, on the other hand, don’t feel guilty about dumping them. When I had this problem with the records of my grandfather’s business, I gave the matter some thought and specifically considered the argument that being unremarkable, they would be the sort of thing less often donated to local archives. And then after pondering this for all of about five seconds, I binned them.
I’m interested in religous history. I have some of my grandfathers reference books, and hymnals, and worship books/prayer books, on my shelf. But not his sermons.
There is a body of thought that is covered in sermons. It has been, more or less, the same for 2000 years. The sermons aren’t supposed to be original thinking.
Either keep them or throw them out. They aren’t his lifes work: they only document it.
Check with the libraries in his home town and the cities where he preached. Some libraries have historical and genealogical collections and are thrilled to receive this stuff. Researchers actually do look at it sometimes.
I can imagine throwing out things, but not information. I honestly think I’d scan them in and save them digitally. Sure, 2000 would be a lot of stuff to scan at one time, but you could slowly chip away at it, maybe while watching TV or doing something else to help with the boredom.
Once it’s digital, it needs to be backed up. And, since it’s digital, it’s likely that places that wouldn’t take the original would be happy for more archives. Worse comes to worse, you could post it on a free website host. All the while keeping them in the cloud somewhere.
In fact, I would have scanned at least the photos (and painting), too. I don’t know about the paperwork you mention: I might scan in the interesting bits and leave out the boring legalese.
That’s me, though. I’m an informational packrat. I have digital information from my first computer–albeit not much. I keep all the pictures I’ve just converted for Wikipedia, for goodness sake.
It is the very definition of the word “ephemera” - items that are intended for a very short life - concert tickets, newspapers, posters… then, the next step up - appliances, record albums, carpet, pets.
I know someone with a genuinely world-class collection of ephemera on the subject of a particular rock band. He’s traveled to several museums (such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) to see about donating the collection when he’s done with it. Nobody will take it.
So, I guess I am not too surprised that I am unable to give away 2000 sermons.
One man’s treasure is another man’s trash. Ain’t that just a kick in the pants?
As someone said upthread, those pieces of paper aren’t his life’s work. They’re a (not the) record of it.
His work was the people he touched with those words. And the impact it had on them and how they lived their lives. And raised their kids. That’s not something you can look at on your shelf or in some museum’s collection. But it’s just as real. More so in fact because it, and its consequences, reverberate with us still.