Family Archives

My mother in high school

I am the family archivist. This comes to me naturally. I was the family photographer, starting in the 1980s. I physically inherited boxes of documents and photos from my father and my mother. I had a brief engagement with family genealogy in the 1990s, and have some partial family trees from that era. I missed an opportunity to review old family photos with my mother, and so a lot of that knowledge is lost forever. Who are these old people in these stiff and faded photos? I just remember old Hester Anne, with her clay pipe, born in 1830. But where on the family tree is she?

I'm paying for a storage unit, where I put some furniture and many boxes after my mother died. I finally decided I needed to make a start on the boxes. I stopped by, and brought a few home and tossed them in the spare room. But before I tackled them, I though I spend a few minutes on the stuff already at my house.

My father in 1952,
when he got his PhD

I was quickly overwhelmed. There is simply too much, it's too diverse, I couldn't decide how to handle it. My initial thought had been to sort and scan as I went, tossing some things outright, others after a scan, and saving few physical items. Though my desktop scanner is of decent quality, it is very slow, and I realized Plan A was simply not going to work. So I stepped back, and spent some time thinking and researching how to organize the project. I didn't want to get too far into it before having to re-do everything I'd already done.

I'm a natural librarian, and I have professional librarian friends. I also have friends in similar situations wanting to tackle similar projects. So I got some sage advice, from physically how to handle the materials to digitally how to set up a filing system. One of the main points is to do a physical sort first, without engaging with any of the materials in depth. Sorting by family branch / family member, and/or by year, seem to be the leading alternatives. And, toss stuff in this first sort. Be realistic. My parents traveled a lot, but does anyone need pictures they took of European buildings, with no recognizable people? Of course not. Keep a trash bag nearby.

It's hard to stick to the guideline of "don't engage" when dealing with documents (as opposed to photos). I have to review them enough to know what I'm looking at. And then it can be hard not to get sucked in. For example, I found a stack of sympathy cards I had received after my sister died. My memories of that time are extremely hazy. I sat down and looked at all the cards, and put them into an archival envelope to keep. They won't be scanned, but maybe I'll look at them again in a few years.

At that point, I realized why the advice is not to engage with the material as you move through it. I was a little bit comforted and also a little bit blue after going through those little bits of thoughtfulness that had come at my most bleak time ever. I needed another break before getting back to it.

So today, with two inches of rain forecast, I dove back in. There was necessarily some spool-up time, as I needed to remind myself how I was doing the physical sort. I know I've decided many photos need to be scanned by a service as doing it myself isn't physically possible. But each service has its rules for how to sort and label batches, so for the time being I'm just grouping by rough family group and date. So all of those will need to be handled again, when I review detailed instructions from a scanning service. Documents can also follow the same rough sort, with another distinction between records (diplomas, birth certificates) and more personal stuff. Probably, documents that get scanned will be scanned by me.

Hester Anne. Note clay pipe.
One of the girls is probably my grandmother

I pulled out a bag - roughly a plastic grocery bag sized bag, and dove in. As it turned out, this bag held stuff from my father's mother, Haila Yvonne Miller Shellabarger. It appears she saved every letter or photograph my father ever sent her. The big surprise - and a treasure trove - is that he wrote to her a lot.  In 1957, the year my family first lived in London, he typed out a tissue-thin blue air letter nearly every week to her. Mundane doings of our young naive American family having an adventure abroad. But there are letters before and after that time as well - somewhere between 50 and 100 in total, I guess. So I sorted out the letters by year, and put them in envelopes for dealing with later. I'm really looking forward to working my way through them. But for now, they are all in a box labelled "Shellabarger - to be scanned."

Most of the photographs are copies my parents sent them. Everything peters out in the mid-1960s. Did long distance become affordable then? Or maybe, more recent things are in another box!

So I packed everything up again, and I'll do more sorting and organizing when next it rains or snows - that will be Wednesday, most likely!