Boxes and Bags and Threads

Last week, someone asked me what genealogy projects I was working on, and I made the mistake of telling the truth out loud.

“Oh not much right now,” I said. “Some stuff has gone quiet, and other projects I’m dragging my feet on.”

I forgot that the ancestors were in the waiting room, and they could hear me. Because I also forgot that I was already planning to take back some boxes of stuff left from when my mom had died.

I sealed my own fate.

The boxes were more of the things I just could not deal with when we cleaned out her apartment. The boxes were hastily packed in 2018, and stashed in my sister’s garage since then. (That sound is a dozen professional archivists rolling their eyes in unison.)

This year, I felt like now was the time to retrieve them. So during my most recent visit we did just that. We dragged out the two boxes and reopened them on my sister’s dining room table for a quick scan and weed.

Pretty quickly, I went from feeling “willing” to “burdened.” It wasn’t just the idea of two more large boxes of unsorted papers and photos from a dozen decades. It was that quite clearly, a significant amount of the photos had not been my mother’s at all. They had come from her last husband—they were HIS family’s photos. 

Which meant I would need to sort them from my mom’s photos, and then find his family members, who I haven’t spoken to since the early 1990s.

It felt like a Jacob Marley chain being laid on my shoulders.

But I also have to do this. I have a situation in my own family, involving photos I may never get to see. It has been a source of tremendous sadness to me. I just can’t do that to someone else.

We tossed a few things and packed it all up. I shipped some, carried some, and this past week I’ve been sorting it all out. Even if I had had time to sort it all in 2018, I couldn’t have. The larger of the two boxes was 28 lbs. of paper and photos. And my mother’s “filing system” was rudimentary at best.

The Stuff, a Partial List:

• 59 blank postcards, 1900-2000s; everywhere from the White House to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

• About a dozen written postcards, including some from globe-trotting Aunt Edith. Also one slightly racy postcard my mom sent to her husband (ew).
• A spoon someone stole from the Greenbriar Inn. What!

• A temperance pamphlet about Thomas Edison.
• The mortarboard tassel from my sister’s law school graduation.
• A resume my mom wrote, full of 100% lies about her qualifications and achievements. Definite keeper!
• The quilt above, made by Edith’s sister Bessie, my great-grandma. I know: It has been in this condition for my whole memory.
• More old silverware to go with the old silverware we already weren’t using, as well as a set of mini silver salt and pepper shakers.

• A full shoebox of photos from my mom’s last husband.
• Six or eight files of genealogy notes written by my great-grandfather and his sons, on fragile onionskin and fastened with rusty paper clips. Sometimes they used shirt pins.

• Memorial guestbooks from two funerals.
• Photos, various, c. 1880s-2000s. Most unlabeled. Oh goody.
• Letters, postcards, manuscripts. Some are important, some are not.
• This sampler, which might be from WWI or could be from 1976. I have no idea.
• This doll. Also have no idea.

The good news is that, with my husband’s help, I have already tossed two full grocery bags of stuff. I’m being ruthless with the weeding. Photos without people, photos without recognizable relatives, photos with recognizable relatives but terrible or blurry, a pile of greeting cards—they all go.

Nothing of value has been lost, so far. And now I can dig into what remains. ☗

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