My family’s history and story is of great concern to, so much so that I intend to reconstruct the family tree as far as I can get in order to know who came before me.
In this same sense, I put a lot a value into objects that have reached through the generations. I have china, some furniture, personal items, photos and photo albums, etc.
Everything tells a piece of a story I wasn’t able to fully live through and instead just brushed me growing up.
It gives me a sense of belonging.
No. We used to have many. My grandparents kept them. After they died, my parents, aunts, and uncle threw everything that wasn’t worth money into a dumpster. They kept the jewelry, coins, watches, and other valuables; everything worth less than $50 got trashed. Photo albums, collars from old pets, pictures they drew as children, sentimental trinkets, my grandpa’s pocket knives, my great grandpa’s letters home during the war for Czech independence, all of it, gone. A lot of it had been stuff I did in school or pictures of me.
“What do you want that for? It ain’t worth nothing,” they would tell me when I asked to keep anything.
People suck.
As my Silent Generation relatives have been dying off, each of them has had boxes of family history - photos, sometimes dating back to early 1900s, diaries/journals, kids’ school art, yearbooks… None of it organized, few of the photos with any indication of who’s in them, where or when they were taken, even who did the art. Shoebox after shoebox of Christmas pictures. Sometimes, one of the survivors will recognize photos, but no one has ever made the effort to record the oral histories, so they will soon be just photos of strangers in mystery locations.
Organize that stuff. Curate it. Make it possible for kids to care.
That was painful to read.
A little while ago a relative told us about how they moved for their parents work. All the toys were thrown out, all the photos; like you everything that wasn’t worth something was disposed of. They even drowned the family cat.
It’s a bit amazing they’re not hardcore hoarders, they just low key keep things.
They drowned the cat? That’s disturbing.
That is for sure!
Only things I’ve had passed down to me like that have been guns.
Several knives, blades, and daggers in my dad’s knife collection belonged to his grandfather, and were passed down to his father. He says he plans on dividing the collection among his kids when the time comes.
Knives mean a lot in our family. We each got our first pocket knife on our 8th birthday, the same way our dad got his first one. Knife safety (especially passing a knife) is part ritual, part common sense. We give them as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, and Easter. It’s a way of making sure the people we love the most will always have the oldest and most useful tool mankind ever invented in their pocket.
I know it’s considered bad luck in some cultures, but to us, it’s a heartfelt act of love. I’ll be honored to have my father’s knife one day.
I don’t have the room for half of the furniture my mother tried to give me. She wanted me to take an old dining table that’s the size of my current living room.
One of those old fashioned solid wood dining table for twelve?
It’s a shame. I wanted to make a solid wood table at some point in my life but four to six seatings will be more than enough.
Happy Cakeday.
It seated 8 comfortably, maybe up to 12 if you crowded a bit. It was SOLID and I regret that it probably ended up in a landfill.
So that is what that little icon means. Thanks.
I’ve seen tables like that very carefully split in two smaller ones. It took serious crafmanship but the end result retained the same “soul”, pardon the expression.
I would have loved to do that but we were so poor food was a problem to manage. Some strong, sturdy furniture made out of solid wood, not particle board wrapped in plastic.
Even synthetic wood can make good furniture nowadays, if one is willing to put in some work.
I’m in the process of building a few bookshelves and we opted for OSB. Well sanded and varnished, it turns into an unusually solid material. And it takes a beating. I involved my kids in process and it has been a near little project.
I just make the calculations for the parts I need and have them cut at a carpenter, that also sells me board. I bring everything home and do the finishing, which is the most expensive part.
Next, I will go into solid wood. And into a more daunting project.
When I talk about particle board it’s much more of the sawdust glued together stuff that’s super cheap but doesn’t last too long.
I wish you great luck in your endeavors with wood working. It sounds like a lot of learning but is a very functional skill to have.
I understood it has such. That is the kind of crap furniture that keeps people hostage and degrades their quality of life.
Thank you for your kind words and I wish you the best as well.
You mean like, from my victims?
Those, I think, are called mementos.
I have a few, and created one of my own. I have a steamer trunk that’s been in the family for 5 or more generations, the family Bible from who knows how far back, and proposed to my wife with the ring my papa used to propose to my mom. I also had a sword forged for my wedding, engraved with our family name. While I don’t intend to have children I plan on passing these things down to my nephews when the time comes
Than sounds like a very well thought plan.
I have a diary of my grandma that she wrote during her evacuation from cologne in 1943, and I have an old mandolin my grandfather bought from a homeless man on a street. That meant my grandmother wouldn’t be able to buy food for their 13 children so she was pissed af, but that makes great story for this instrument.
That is quite a story.
We have an accordion played by my great grandfather.
Does anyone still knows how to play it?
Unfortunately no! I will learn if it passes into my hands - I already play other instruments.
All the luck on that!
Yup, I’ve got quite a few things by now, and I’m in line for some more.
I don’t know about a sense of belonging, but a historical thing you’re tangentially connected to is cooler than just a random historical thing.
Not really. My wife has some bulky furniture that we plan on tossing out once her mother dies. It’s worthless and of no practical use, which is probably why she passed it by on already.
My grandparents had some cool stuff, but their children got in an argument over some of it, so I don’t know who got what and I don’t want anything to do with that. Hopefully they’re happy with ruining their relationships over items that belong in a museum.
For some, yes, for others it’s just stuff that takes up space. The reality of today is there’s often not going to be the financial capacity to hold onto much. Boomers had excess space because they could afford big houses with large garages and outbuildings on large tracts of land.
Even a quarter acre plot is large by today’s shithole subdivision standards. Garages are reduced down to barely fit a vehicle, and driveways likely won’t hold the length of a full sized truck. Basements have been taken away. Shared walls instead of yards on single family townhomes instead of homes.
Even on antiques roadshow, unless it’s Tiffany, knick knacks and general clutter without use items are continuously down in price.
Few have the luxury of space any more.
Take a trip through the online auction markets. Not warehouse returns/junk, just the estate dissolutions with on site pickups after purchase. Or companies like CTBids that operate nationally and do estate downsizing for elderly selling their houses for assisted living situations or small condos, in addition to full estate auctions.
You’re scrolling pages and pages of “crap” inheriting families were going to toss out or things they couldn’t afford to store and keep.
A bit voyeuristic, but you’ll quickly see what people value now. China? No. You can’t use it because you can’t microwave it. Lots of knick knack crap selling for under $5, life collections and such. The useful stuff bids up pretty high. Tools. Even expired MREs. Not collections.
The real prize is the house, and the auction house clears the valuables turned clutter from it faster than families can.
I have a painting of the Australian desert that belonged to my mother. It’s banished to the second bedroom because it’s got a thick coating of nicotine, but I plan to have it cleaned some day.
Nicotine can be hard to clean. I wish you all the luck with that.
I don’t have any official heirlooms, but I like to bake, and have inherited a few quality vintage mixing bowls that my grandparents - and later my parents - used, so I consider them to be heirlooms at this point.
So, yes*.
I have a few objects of importance that have been passed down but I don’t like to horde stuff. For me it can’t just be something they owned but something they valued or actually used.
And admittedly something that isn’t outrageously large and/or broken.
Being broken often means it was used and valued. I have an old wrist watch that is, apparently, irrepairable. It isn’t going anywhere. An old TV with which I grew up, went.
Sadly I was the black sheep of the family and having nothing from my side. I really wanted this chair from my grandma and my grandpa’s grandfather clock. Or really anything. My grandma made her own cards and I would have been happy with her stamp collection which no one else in the family wanted. My mom sold them without even offering me a chance to buy them.
On my wife’s side though we’ve become what I call “The Keepers of the Ancient Ways”.
We have been handed the old family recipes. We have been handed trunks of family photos that I’m slowly digitizing. We actually ended up in my wife’s grandpa’s house that my wife basically grew up in. I’m trying to compile as many stories from relatives as I can. We are slowly building a family tree (if you want any advice just holler. There’s a lot of pitfalls newbies miss).
We try to collect only the truly meaningful things so we can document them but my wife’s family has strong hoarder tendencies so we walk a line.
Hoarding is dangerous.
Are you using or planning to use GRAMPS? That is my intention.
And you mention your grandma made her own cards? As in greeting cards? Playing cards? Tarot cards?
Are you using or planning to use GRAMPS?
I use Wikitree to document my tree. GRAMPS was a consideration but trying to share with older relatives was going to be an issue for me that way. I do keep a local GEDCOM copy though. Yes I do feel disgusted the LDS created the format every time I save a backup. Gedcom files can be used with basically everything if you weren’t aware.
The biggest pitfall I’ve seen is trusting other people’s work. At all. You might stumble upon what looks like a full family tree of your relatives and start adding people to yours and get all excited about this treasure of information you’ve found. You’ll realize later it’s probably so big because the person spent a while on Ancestry.com just randomly accepting any “match” and it isn’t really that accurate.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with perusing the trove of data on acenstry.com, and there’s good trees around from there. Just verify.
The second biggest pitfall is similar, start by not trusting family stories. In my family I always grew up hearing we were related to the people who built the white house, and had Native American blood (an especially common story in America which I could write for ages on) in us, and were related to a famous poet. Turns out none of that was true and until I realized that I spent hours chasing down random paths trying to prove those things I supposedly knew. Turns out we just had someone who’s name was “White”, there may be an ancestor who’s last name was “Whitehouse”, the poet just happened to have the same last name, and for us a part of the family was in the KKK and disappointed a different family member had married a person of color and to cover it up they claimed the dark skin was native american.
And you mention your grandma made her own cards?
Grandma made mostly greeting cards. Every birthday and christmas was a custom card from her. I wish I had thought when I was younger to keep more of them or at least a picture of some of them. She had boxes and boxes of stamps and different textured paper and strips of fabric and things. Each one was always hand made with care.
I have another hobby with fountain pens and trading postcards around the world and know I could have put at least some of it to use.
I’ll be using the birth, marriage and death certificates my country issues to go beyonf my own memory. This will give me at least 75 years of reliable and easily accessible information. At some point, I’ll have to query my national library where such registries are kept for historical purposes.
There are a few things I want to put a rest to, like the story of an uncle, who alledgelly spent 18 years in prison and a supposed move of a branch of the family from one area to another in the country. Some 90 years or more in the past, it was uncommon.
The move 90 years ago I might actually believe. A great uncle of mine did basically the same thing, picked up a whole branch of the family and moved. After WWI they’d struggled to rebuild and he saw the start of WWII coming (although he didn’t realize how big it would be at the time). He moved just far enough to get a new start with people who didn’t know him before and went from there. I’ve seen others did the same before WWI seeing it coming.
Also around the 1850’s to 1960’s was the peak of cruise ships. It opened up movement a little more and people started realizing they could possibly relocate easier. That was also the tail end of railroad mania which caused a lot of that shuffling around of people.
Not in my country. Workers would travel around, even work away from home for months, but always returned home. There wasn’t much movement within the country and when the dictatorship settled in things just got harder. The country was mostly rural then and nearly every peasant had a peace of land to sow some potatoes, cabbage, turnips and onions, along with some vines for wine. Leaving that notion of security was very hard. Hence the strangeness of a branch of the family leaving their origin.
