Yes!
If you one day become President of the United States, or if you become a serial murderer or a terrorists, then the public will want to see all this. Those things cannot be replaced.
I guess I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want anyone to have it. Actually, the stuff I found (WITH my grandmother’s express permission, BTW) shed a lot of light on why she was the way she was, and in a good way. I even wrote her a long mushy letter about it at the time.
My Nana was a very warm, kind, but passive person, beloved by all, and until I found all that new information about her parents and her upbringing, I never understood why she continually put up with the crap she put up with. I never understood why she never really learned to cook, or stand up for her own wants and needs, or handle her own household finances, or talk about her childhood. I actually wrote her a long letter about that it reflected quite fabulously on her that she had overcome the hardships that she did and turned out to be the person she was in spite of everything. She was quite touched by the whole experience.
Your mileage obviously varies - your prerogative, of course.
My older brother died when we were both in our early twenties. Mom lived on the other side of the country, so my dad and I were left with much of the work of cleaning out his place (he was renting) and figuring out what to do with his stuff.
Among many other things, we found a set of ten or fifteen journals, all were identical big hardcover books with multicolored pages, all were very carefully maintained, properly dated entries filled the pages, all in his tidy print.
One of his friends asked if she could have them.
When I called Mom about some other details, I mentioned the journals and asked for her advice. I was taken aback by her strong response: “Burn them.” She lectured me on how they were his own private thoughts and how no one had any right to read his journals.
She made me promise that I would burn them.
I remember his friend crying as I told her what I had to do. Tears were running down her cheeks as she begged and pleaded for me not to go through with it.
I opened one of then and read a few entries—I think I might have found something written about one of the times I had visited him while I was in the Navy—but I remembered my mother’s wishes and I closed the book.
I went down to the basement in his landlord’s house and stoked up a good fire in the fireplace and then I burned them one by one.
At the time I didn’t think my mom was out of line, and I took her wishes at face value, as demands for respect for the dead. These days I often wonder what she thought was in those journals—what she knew was in those journals.
I had lived far from my brother for a few years before he died, so we really did not know the intimate details of each other’s lives, so it is quite possible he had confided in her about some things I was not privy to, and she didn’t to tarnish my memories of him, perhaps.
But I can’t figure out what would be so bad she wouldn’t want me to know about it. His checkered past was full of stuff that I did know about and accepted, such as a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, so what could it be?
That was decades ago, and I still regret burning those journals. Even if I had to wade through pages upon pages of him writing about what an ass his brother was, I wish I could read some of the memories we shared together, from his point of view.
By the way, going through your deceased older sibling’s stuff is freaky. It truly sucks. I remember finding the pearl handled switchblade knife that he had obtained as a teenager, but that I was forbidden to touch—oh how I had coveted that knife. And there I was flipping it open and snapping it shut, knowing that he never was going to catch me and yell at me for messing with his stuff. Whatever remains of his things after all these years would probably fit in a shoebox, but I still have that knife.
Mom’s post-divorce vibrator. Thing was ancient.
I’m still not right.
I have some mental health issues and have recently struggled with my Mother’s behaviors and the absence of a father.
I think at least being able to see stuff from them or the past would help me. I recently had to get my birth certificate for a VA form and when I got it, I studied it. I stared at my father’s name. It made me think of who he was/is and about my mother. I wish there was more information on it.
I also recently have had discussions with my Aunt about my Mothers mental health and it was very mind clearing and opening. She told me of my Mothers childhood, my Grandmother’s thoughts on my mother and why some of the events in my life occurred.
I have been scanning my documents (it is a very handy way to keep up with all documents that you may need to use/review at another time)
Please, *please *hang on to documents! Last summer, all of my mom’s siblings were in town to help clean out my grandparents’ home in preparation for selling it. We ended up bringing boxes of old documents over to my oldest uncle’s house, where we all got together for a cookout after the last cleaning session. We went through everything in those boxes and had a really great time passing everything around: report cards, letters, handmade birthday cards, programs from performances, photographs. The important stuff we saved; the rest we burned in the firepit. But we got to all decide together what was kept; only the things that no one wanted were destroyed.
Once you’re dead, you’re not going to be in a position to be embarassed by what others might read about you. But those descendants–direct or not, biologically related or not–may very well be wanting a connection to their family’s history. Even if you’re “just” an aunt or “just” a great-aunt (not meaning to direct this specifically at you, Anaamika, just speaking in general about degree of consanguinuity).
Oh, I used to snoop through my parents’ stuff all the time. My dad stored his Navy sword in the closet. I would take it out to look at it. For a while there, I thought my mom had a very special, very valuable miniature Frisbee. It came in its own case, and she kept it in the nightstand. Didn’t realize until I was in college that it had to be diaphragm.
But the thing I realized that really knocked me off my feet didn’t come from snooping. It was one day when I walked past the picture of my maternal grandparents, like I had a thousand times before, and I suddenly stopped, looked closer, and thought, “hey, Grandma and Grandpa both had blue eyes. But Mom has brown eyes. I wonder h-”
Two possibilities: Grandma got a little outside help (and knowing my Grandpa, I really wouldn’t blame her) or Auntie is really Grandma, and Grandma is really G-Grandma. Mom doesn’t know and is very uncomfortable discussing. Auntie has Alzheimers, so she won’t be telling anyone.
Small ironic part: Grandma (or G-Grandma depending on your reckoning) is the only family member I look like. Right down to the eyes. My brother on the other hand, looked like a carved miniature of Grandpa when he was a baby. No resemblance these days.
Oh, and not at all hidden, because my father put it in the memoir he self-published several years ago: he cheated every chance he got on his first wife. And now he wonders why my half-siblings don’t have much time for him. sigh
I used to think my family was normal . . .
By this point, I’ve found out so many shocking and bizarre things about my family members that NOTHING could shock me anymore. And I do mean NOTHING. I’m descended from slaves and slave owners. One of my great-aunts abandoned her family and became a hooker in New Orleans. Another married four times to two men (she married each of them twice). Wretched, abusive marriages. Lots of illegitimate children all over the family tree. Several suicides, a possible suicide or two, and a couple of people who just plain disappeared and were never heard from again. And yes, the Down’s Syndrome child who my mother’s aunt shut up in an institution and refused to acknowledge existed until the day she died.
My mother’s cousin was a teenaged prostitute who was drowned by one of her Johns.
My grandfather murdered a man and went to prison for it.
For what it’s worth, it’s unlikely but not entirely impossible for two blue-eyed people to produce a brown-eyed child. It could’ve been a case of incomplete dominance in one parent or the other (genotype says brown-eyed, but the gene failed to dominate and instead the phenotype expressed as blue-eyed).
A DNA test would shed some light.
Actually, that does sound reasonably normal to me. 
Not snooping, but still shocking…
First group of shockers: My mom was pregnant when she married my dad. Her sister was pregnant when she married. Their mom was pregnant when she married. My dad was born out of wedlock. My mother’s maternal grandmother divorced her husband because he committed bigamy. Charges were filed, he was convicted and did time. He was a cop in Washington, DC at the time (early 1910s). After so as they divorced and he got out of jail, he married “the other woman” and was never heard from again.
Second shocker: When I read my father’s will I learned he had fathered–yet another!–child out of wedlock. My mom had known about two of them, but the third one was actually the first born of the three. My mom told me he’d made a death-bed confession about the first-born daughter. Mom was not happy about this, but bears no ill will towards the daughter. Frankly, I suspect I have more half-siblings out there, but the children dad fathered with (most of) his wives and the three out-of-wedlock children are the only ones he was sure of…or so he said. 
It took over 15 years to locate my half-sister (her birth name was very common, we didn’t know if she’d been legally adopted, had married and taken her husband’s surname, etc). I have to give her mom credit for not poisoning my half-sister’s mind against my dad. Her mom simply refused to talk about him, but never trashed his name or character (which, frankly, he deserved. But more on that family dynamic at another time.) I regret we couldn’t locate my half-sister before her mom died because I wish I had had the opportunity to thank her for not warping her daughter’s mind with hatred towards our father. When it came to his relationships with women he was more pathetic than evil.
Third shocker: My mother was estranged from her parents since she married my father (actually, her parents disowned her for marrying my dad). Anyway…fast forward +40 years…her mom dies. Her dad contacts her to kiss and make up because he’s old and frail and needs someone to take care of him. My mom does her “Christian duty”, forgives the old coot and does what she can to help him (without falling back into a dysfunctional relationship with him–good for her!)
Her dad eventually has to go into a nursing home. She puts boxes upon boxes of her parents’ STUFF in storage in order to get their house ready for sale. A few years later, her dad dies. He had named my mom executrix of his will and she settles the estate. Every year, she goes through a box or two of the STUFF to see if any of it is needed/important or can be disposed of/ recycled/ donated/ given away, etc. Most of it is fripperies and old TV Guides, Reader’s Digests, and the like.
Shortly after my mom and her parents became estranged, my mom’s brother, “E” was in a bad car wreck, separated from the military, and died a few months later of a brain tumor. My mom, with three small children and no money at the time, was unable to attend the funeral. As a member of the military, E was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery. At least, that’s what my mom’s parents told her sister at the time.
Several years ago, my mom and her sister got into genealogy. They tried to locate their brother’s burial plot at Arlington. There was no record of him having been interred anywhere at Arlington. No remains, no cremains, no marker, no memorial–nada, nulo, niente, nuthin’.
About six years ago, I was visiting my mom and she asked my help to move one of her dad’s boxes from by the window–the box on which the old cat loved to snooze in the sunlight–to next to her big chair where mom could open the box and peruse the contents.
It was mostly full of papers–carbon copies of typewritten letters. Letters her dad had written in the months following E’s death to E’s attending physician, asking–pleading–for the physician’s help in making a case to the military that E’s death was a result of injuries sustained in the car accident and that, as E had been active-duty at the time of the wreck, the military should cover the costs of E’s hospitalization, his home health aide, and the cost of disposing of his body. The military had turned down my grandfather’s request at least twice. (I won’t give the reason why as that would be painful for my family to have it posted to an open forum. Sorry.) My grandparents were in serious debt for many years because they had to cover all these costs.
The box also contained books, papers, and mementos from E’s military service, including his dog tags. As my mom read through her dad’s letters, she held her hand in front of her mouth, choking back sobs. The hospitalization records indicated that her brother had died of an aneurysm. While my mom was reading the letters and the hospital reports, I poked around a little in the box. My eyes fell on a cardboard box, slightly larger than a brick, wrapped in plastic wrap and bound with thick, dried out rubber bands at each end. I had seen other boxes like that one and was pretty sure I knew what was in it.
I gently caught my mother’s attention and pointed out the smaller box. “Do you think what I think is in that box?” I asked. She studied the box for several long seconds, then looked at me with wide eyes. The mystery of where her brother had been laid to rest was solved. http://www.dramabutton.com/
And to anyone who thinks I’m “fibbing”: I have legal documents that can prove the essentials of what I posted. That is, if in your opinion legal documents can serve as proof. If they don’t, maybe a seance in which we call up the dear departed and ask them to corroborate will suffice? 
I’ve heard enough stories about my family, told by my relatives, that nothing much could shock me anymore.
However.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she started keeping a journal. After she died I was the one who found it. She had written stuff that had never happened, couldn’t have been misunderstood as having happened, and was so out of character for both my mother and whoever she was talking about that we wouldn’t have believed it happened even if it were possible. (e.g., she said things about me that I know damn well never happened; things that my sisters supposedly said or did while they were 1,000 miles away, etc.)
It was obvious that between the cancer and the drugs, my mother had gotten quite delusional. I told my sisters they could read it if they wanted, but we’d probably all be a lot happier if I just destroyed it. They agreed.
Moral: just because someone wrote it in a diary doesn’t mean it was true.
Not my blood relative, but my step-brother made this movie all from old family movies and recordings, along with thousands of pages of journal entries found after my step-grandmother’s death. One envelope of the papers was marked, “Must Read After My Death”. It had some nice reviews during it’s film festival days.
It was a big bit of nervousness for the surviving family members. It was looking doubtful for a while that it might get their permission at all.
Sudden family members in the mid 80’s. I learned that my grandfather had married in the early 1900’s, fathered three children, divorced, drank a good bit, and then fathered an illegitimate child before marrying my grandmother who ,since she was trying to get away from an abusive family, stayed with him until he died in the 40’s and she had to raise the kids cluelessly through the 50’s and 60’s.
I discovered that my father owns a copy of The Seven Lady Godivas by Dr. Seuss. I was both confused and aroused.
Wow I remember reading about this movie when it was released! I think Ebert reviewed it. I’ve never seen it but I remember being fascinated by it. I hoped it would be the movie I remembered the instant I saw your link.
My mom hasn’t passed away, but I discovered that the majority of my baby pictures aren’t of me, but of my older brother who died of SIDS before I was born. The only baby pictures that I know are of me are those taken by other family members. She still doesn’t know that I know this.
I, of course, thought it was fascinating. 
It’s really hard for me to separate my familial emotions from the cinematic experience, of course, but I do think it’s a really interesting film, even if you’re not seeing your own family’s artifacts on the screen (that weird lobster wall art you see in a few clips used to terrify me as a child!).
Here’s Ebert’s review, which I largely agree with. As a not-official postscript, I’ll add that the Allis I grew up knowing was a very happy, independent, stunningly intelligent woman, who never mentioned Charley to me once, not even in passing. Ebert’s note at the end of his review that Allis “never mentioned Charley again” may or may not be literally true, but it was true that she never mentioned him to me. Nor did my stepmother, Allis’s daughter, ever tell me even so much as her father’s name. I knew nothing of the events in the film until I watched it. Which was pretty weird in itself, finding that kind of stuff out about your family while sitting in a movie theater surrounded by strangers!
So, yeah, old papers may be quite interesting to other people in the family, on many different levels. 