It’s easy when you’re young. You save cards, letters, concert ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, school papers, certificates and awards, and photos photos photos. You save your stuff as well as stuff related to friends, grandparents, parents, and children.
What are you going to do with all of it? How do you manage or organize it? Is it in boxes? Scrapbooks? Have you digitized it? How do you decide what’s worth keeping? How many pictures of grandma do you need? What about all those birthday cards and holiday cards?
I could use some ideas for turning all this paper into family history – something that won’t end up in the trash at my estate sale.
I figure I’ll start by tossing photos of people I don’t recognize. But what then?
If it’s photos or other small, cuttable items, you can make a collage. My grandma did this, cutting out the faces and other important bits of each photo and then fitting them all together into a large rectangle for framing.
In the modern world, I might scan each photo and item first, before cutting, but this does give people a chance to see everything without having a honkin scrapbook tossed in their lap.
A friend of mine uses the large size (quart? 1/2 gallon?) Zip Loc bags, the kind you can write on, and organizes them by the names of the people associated with and keeps them in a vertical file in her closet. (I wish I was that organized.)
That’s a good idea too! I’d have to check and see if long-term storage in plastic is okay for photos. It can’t be worse than some of the old photo albums I’m using.
But it’s a start – getting them organized by who they are, which side of the family.
I scrapbook the important things with the story in my words or my thoughts about the pictures, memorabilia, etc. I hope somewhere along the line, when I can no longer enjoy them, someone else will appreciate the history or insite to who I am.
Pictures that I don’t scrap, I put in archivally safe photo albums (but only the decent ones), hang on the wall, or toss (the really awful ones).
I love that idea, if I could get someone else to do it. My daughter-in-law is a scrapbooker, and she’s coming for a visit in a couple of weeks. I wonder if she’d be offended if I gave her some photos and asked her to make a few pages for me. I’m not very creative – maybe she can inspire me.
I’ve been cleaning out closets and drawers. The longer I keep something, the easier it is to throw it away. Seems like it should be the other way around.
I don’t envy you; my father had a whole trunk of family history which I assume I will someday have to deal with. For my own stuff, I have one Sterilite box where it all goes. I know that my identity is in there, but it’s not organized in any particular way.
When my long-lost dad died, his friend sent me all of his personal effects (the paper kind) from the nursing home – seven divorce decrees and his military records. The info on the military records was enough for me to start researching that side of the family. I found a website where someone else had done a lot of work.
From the divorce decrees, I discovered two half-brothers. With help from a Unaboarder, I tracked one down and wrote to him, but he didn’t respond.
I’d be getting into that trunk, but it’d just distract me from organizing my own stuff.
May I offer a suggestion regarding the photos of people you don’t know? Because in my family, we, the survivors of a lot of deceased people, have no one left to ask who these strangers (to us) in the photos were. If you have anyone old enough to remember any of those faces, please arrange to ask them to look at pictures with you someday soon, and write the names on the back in pencil. You may find out who they were and how they were connected to the people in the photos that you do know.
Let’s see,… photos going back generations, baptism records, report cards and diplomas for his parents and maybe even his grandparents, many of my grandfather’s drawings and cartoons (private and published in the paper) including a detailed map of his tour in WW2, some materials my brother and I made him when we were little , newspaper clippings “<Mom’s Name> Will Marry <Pop’s Name>” --the engagement announcement was very demanding, and much, much more. After Grandma died this year he got a bunch more stuff and was relieved that he got it all to fit in the trunk. Partly by sending stuff to me :smack:
The stuff from Mom’s side of the family is with her brother, I think.
My daughter-in-law is a scrapbooker, and she’s coming for a visit in a couple of weeks. I wonder if she’d be offended if I gave her some photos and asked her to make a few pages for me. I’m not very creative – maybe she can inspire me.