Do I need these old papers? Also, secrets you discovered from snooping through your parents' stuff

In My Humble Opinion
21

My father in law died in 2000. My MiL decided to sell the house and turned over a bunch of paperwork and files to Lady Chance. Going through them we found a picture of a baby about 1 year old and a note from an adoption agency to my MiL in her maiden name outlining where the baby had been placed and the race of the couple (it was the 60s) who adopted her.

Her name was Anne Marie and she’s about 2 years older than Lady Chance. She was born before FiL and MiL were even dating, much less married.

Woo…

22

Isn’t that stuff part of your Permanent Record anyway? If you need it you can always get it from there! :wink:

Seriously, I think saving that kind of stuff depends upon how sentimental you are. I personally try and not be a sentimental pack rat. I limit myself to one large plastic bin to save sentimental stuff like that. I go through it about every 5 years, add some stuff to it, and take some stuff out and throw it away.

23

Such materials are only interesting when they are a brief cloudy window into the past.

24

Two things:

When my great-great aunt died, I went through her papers. She did most of the raising of me, she was 88 and her remaining sisters (she never married) were either too infirm or too distraught to cope with it.

I found a letter from one of my cousins, who I call Aunt (she’s my grandfather’s first cousin) to my aunt, from when I had been at college. At the time, my mom and I weren’t speaking, my daddy remained his flaky self and had no cash, and Wese (my g-g aunt) was trying to help me go to college. She wasn’t poor, but she wasn’t rich and I was working full time and going to school full time. This particular cousin-aunt had had the best of everything, is a lawyer herself, married to someone who did well for themselves. Her children had the best of everything, too, private school, etc. One died very young of an aneurism, one crashed and burned into drug abuse (and killed herself much later, sadly :() and one was my age and doing well for himself at college. She wrote a long, heartfelt letter about the children in my family, and how I was the only one who wasn’t well off and who’s parents were neglectful (true) and how Wese had dedicated her whole retirment to me with little or no help besides my Grandmother (actually my g-grandmother, her younger sister) who had died many years earlier. So she had sent Wese a large check, and had been sending Wese some money every month, on the condition that I stopped working full time to concentrate on college and on the condition that Wese never told me.

She never did tell me. I did stop working full time at Wese’s encouragement (we’ll work it out somehow, she said.) I did get my degree.

I’ve never spoken to this aunt about it, she said she didn’t want me to know. I always felt a bit isolated from our wider family (lots of reasons - my father is adopted and was adopted when he was nearly a teenager, we were poor and nobody else was, etc.) so it was both a big shock and a big revelation that these people really did care about us, even though we seldom saw them. I was miserable about Wese’s death, so this made it as better as it could be.

The second thing, really my mom but effects me, too:

My mother went through my grandfather’s papers after he died. I have an uncle, born in Australia in WWII. His name is David. That’s all I know (Mom won’t tell me any more). My grandparents weren’t yet married, but they were engaged.

The funny thing is that I ended up here in Sydney, and I pass the place Grandpa was stationed every day, and I think somewhere out there, maybe in this city, is an uncle I don’t know. If I see a man in his mid-60s with a very distinctive nose, I tend to stare at him, wondering if this is “David”.

So papers are…powerful. But pitch yours, Anamika, if they don’t mean anything to you.

25

Here’s something I found, though not recently - when I (finally) got a hold of my adoption papers (seriously it was less than five years ago), I discovered that a) my bio mom was actually much older than I had been told when she got pregnant with me, and b) everyone had told me my bio dad’s name incorrectly. I mean, a totally different name - like his name was Bob Smith and everyone was telling me Tim Jones. It makes no difference to me, it came to me at a time when I was reconciled with the fact that my real parents are total flakes and that doesn’t reflect on me but it is a surprise to discover your mother was not a teen mother like you’d always been told but was actually well into her twenties and everyone had been lying about her age ever since. (I was adopted by an aunt so I still saw her lots before I found out). Why? Was it to minimize the stigma? She was just a teen, so it was stupid of her and not willful? Eh?

I can guess why the name change on my dad though - so I wouldn’t find him if I looked for him. As if I’d ever look for that jerkass! He’s dead now anyway and beyond my reach in any way. I could go destroy the rest of his family I suppose but why inflict that on them?

26

Wow…just, wow.

27

When I was a kid while the rest of the family was out, I was snooping around my parent’s closet looking for rented porno VHS tapes. I found them inside a box under some stored away blankets. While reaching in, there seemed to be a smaller box inside. I managed to put my hand inside it and felt…

a dildo. Yikes! :eek:

28

I’d absolutely keep them. They may not interest you today, but who knows how you’ll feel 30 or 40 years down the road when memories are fading and you’d like a connection to your past. It’s just a folder, anyway, it’s not taking up any space. You can always choose to get rid of it in the future, but once it is gone, it is gone forever. You never know how you may feel sometime down the road.

29

When I was making my family tree, I saw that my uncle was born seven months after my grandparents got married. I brought it up with Mum, and she said that she’d noticed the same thing many years ago, and realised that was the reason they never celebrated their anniversary.

30

Old papers can be valuable if you were raised by parents who wanted to “protect” you from the truth (I don’t necessarily mean this is a derogatory way).

After my father died, I found a letter he had written to my mother when I was about 5 or 6. He worked on an oil rig, so he often worked long stretches away from home. In the letter, he was scolding my mother for “acting like that,” and told her that it could affect his reputation. At the time, the families of those who worked on the rig travelled and pretty much lived as a group in small trailer house communities out in the middle of nowhere in the southwest US. It could be a pretty desolate existence.

I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He didn’t spell out what she did, and I couldn’t find any context in the letter. My mother was legally committed to a state psychiatric hospital a couple of years after the letter and remained in various institutions off and on for the rest of her life. What exactly was my father talking about? Did she get drunk and make an ass of herself? Did she slut around? Did she just generally act crazy (and, oh yes, she could act crazy). Since all the people who would know have died, I’ll never know.

But I’d like to. Knowing more details wouldn’t really make any actual difference in my life, but I really didn’t know any more about what happened with my mother other than she had a “nervous breakdown,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Also, my grandparents took my brothers and me in to raise soon before my mother’s commitment and I never really got to know my father, a private man and alcoholic, very well. For instance, my brothers and I found his Army discharge papers after he died and found out that he had been a cook. My father had never said one way or the other exactly what he did in the Army, but insinuated that it had something to do with combat. The fact that my father was apparently ashamed of his Army experience tells me that my father was not a happy man with himself.

If my parents had left more day to day documentation about their lives, I feel like I could learn more about who I am, and I surprisingly find that that’s important, even at 53.

31

After my father passed, docs came out that he had been propping up the finances of two of my sisters (EB1 & EB2) and their supposedly successful husbands with cash bail-outs and mortgages for Years. Bank of Dad indeed.

But, Dad was awesome at record keeping, had them sign paperwork/mortgages, & made very specific instructions as to how these were to be considered debts owed to the estate at the time of his death.
This came as quite a shock to the ladies who thought these debts had long been forgotten and had come to [del] shout “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Its Mine! I’m in Grief, Here’s Mah Purse… Fill 'Er Up! Woo-Hoo!!!”[/del] express grief and help settle the estate.

32

I’ve never found anything shocking in my parents papers, but that is probably because they are all still alive.

When I find my old stuff, or when I can’t decide about keeping my children’s stuff I save a digital version - just scan it or even take a photo. That way the info is preserved for posterity but it isn’t taking up space.

33

That my father may have committed suicide.

See, my dad died when I was two years old. I don’t remember him at all. He died in a work-related accident. A few years ago my grandmother gave me some old papers and things related to him. Part of the packet was funeral stuff - the obituary, notes from mourners, that sort of thing.

One of the notes said something to the effect of “I’m sure it was an accident.” Wow! That one sentence made a whole lot of things click about my life and what I’d heard about his. About how my grandmother would always say he had a premonition of his death because he told her he knew he’d be dead before he was 30. About how she caught him playing with me on the floor with tears in his eyes. She asked him why he was crying and he said it was because he’d never know me as I grew up. About my own depression, which just so happens to run in that side of the family but no one told me about it until i struggled in silence for years. So many things made sense with that one sentence.

Now maybe he didn’t commit suicide, but still. Heck of a thing to stumble upon.

34

After my mother passed away, my Dad went through her papers. He found several reporter’s notebooks filled with shorthand writing. These were Mom’s secret journals she had kept for years. He taught himself to read shorthand and started translating them. He found a part in one where it seemed that she might have had an affair, although he couldn’t quite tell.

Rather than be angry with her, I found it fascinating. That would be so unlike her!

35

I would just about kill for that kind of info on my (late) great-aunt. It would explain a lot of things about the family dynamics (i.e. dysfunctional) on Dad’s side. Personally, I’d consider it part of the family heritage and would be pissed as hell if I found out someone had destroyed it without even offering it to someone else in the family who might want it. My aunt and cousins and I have spent years trying to piece everything together, and my aunt even became a psychologist, in part, as a result of spending her adult life trying to figure out her family dynamics; she went back for her Ph.D. in her 50s after her kids were all grown.

(Long story short, and I’ve written about it a bit here before, my grandmother and her siblings were raised in an orphanage in Winnipeg in the 1920s, although both their parents were living - their mom had some kind of nervous breakdown, and their dad had abandoned them. My dad didn’t know any of this until he was in his 40s. Apparently he’d never thought to ask about his maternal grandparents, where they lived, who they were, what happened to them, etc. Like I said, Dad’s side is kind of dysfunctional and I’d really treasure any info that would shed light on the dysfunctionality and/or help me figure out how to deal with the continuing fallout from same. And the same goes for my aunt and cousins.)

36

Some years ago (a decade or more,) I was given instructions by my mother to destroy a box of letters, cards, and keepsakes should something happen to her before my stepdad passes away. I’m allowed to read it if I want to, but I already know what the box contains (not minutely, but in general): notes and cards and small gifts from an affair pre-dating her involvement with her current husband. It’s not a big secret from me or my brother, but my stepdad is kind of sensitive about the whole thing.

As for other old papers, I would love to have had a chance to go through some of my grandfather’s and great-grandmother’s papers. For one, I’m curious about where Granddaddy was and what he was doing when he left my grandmother briefly. Did he have an affair (as she supposes,) or did he just need a break from decades and decades and decades of Grandmother’s unrelenting, never-ending bitchiness? (Honestly, I wouldn’t really blame him either way. Maybe I should, but I wouldn’t.) And I’d like to know who was the father of my great-grandmother’s oldest daughter. As far as I know, Granny never told a soul, including that daughter, the identity of the father, and I wonder whether there was any paperwork that might have shed some light on that mystery.

37

Something I wrote in another thread:

OMG!!! I just read the “…” in my parents wedding album!

My mother passed away in 1968 when I was a year old, my father passing away 39 years later. After he died, I was given a large amount of personal papers and such from their time together in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including the only picture I have ever seen of my four siblings and mother and father together.

So I’m reading their wedding album more closely and I notice that there’s an extended section of her writing about the time she met my father, including her original observations, etc.

So I guess it’s true, that scene in Mamma Mia! about the “dot dot dot’s”. And this was a double-triple-dot, I guess for added emphasis.

It’s very sweet and all, but still… this was the first date, mom!

38

That’s a bit silly. Below a certain point (and I’m not sure exactly where the line is, but I believe around ~50ish which is about 3 standard deviations below the mean), IQ tests can’t be used to make any meaningful distinctions. Same goes for the very high end.

39

None of it is any of their business unless I choose to make it so. Actually, this post makes me even more happy I destroyed it. To think that sometime in the future someone might be going through my stuff to find out about my “dysfunctionality”…ugh.

It’s MY stuff. No one else has a right to it, unless I want them to have it.

40

Amen