What To Keep And What To Photograph And Let Go

Keeping everything is not preservation, it is postponement, and it usually ends with somebody else throwing it all out.

Nobody can keep it all, and pretending otherwise guarantees a worse outcome. A garage packed to the ceiling is not an archive, and the person who eventually has to clear it will be tired, grieving and short of time, which is the condition under which good things get skipped. Deciding now, calmly, with the people involved, produces a small collection somebody will actually look after instead of a large one nobody can face. Volume is the enemy of care, and a collection that fits on a shelf will be opened far more often than one that fills a room.

A workable filter has three parts. Keep what is unique and irreplaceable: handwriting, original photographs, personal papers, the one hand made thing. Photograph and release what is bulky, mass produced or valuable only for the story attached to it, because a good photograph plus a written story carries almost all of the meaning at a fraction of the space. Be honest about the third category, which is material kept purely from guilt, and remember that letting an object go is not a verdict on the person it belonged to. Where feelings run high, keep the item and revisit it in a year rather than forcing a decision nobody is ready to make.

Photograph the released items properly rather than in passing. Plain background, even light, several angles, any maker's marks or inscriptions, and a scale reference so size is obvious. Then write the story beside the image, in the words of whoever knows it. Done well, this is often more useful to a grandchild than the object would have been, because the object would have sat in a cupboard unexplained while the photograph and its paragraph can be read in a minute. Store those images with the rest of the archive rather than loose on a phone, or you have simply changed the shape of the problem.