Money for writing! Yay, Allyson!

This is about a different sort of writing, but I think it still applies here. I received today my mother-in-law's lifetime collection of genealogy research and books. She's in a nursing home and not expected to come out of it. I am officially the family genealogist. Now I need to go through it all and pull it into shape--at the same time pulling my own genealogy together as well as finishing the fun stories. As well as having a life--sometime.

Along with her research, though, are lots of other books and mementos. Lots of family pictures, most of which with no identifiers. And now I'm wrestling with archivist's guilt. I can't keep it all. I'm going to contact my sister-in-law to see if she wants any of the pictures--I think one big batch is from when her daughter was born--but there are still huge amounts. I asked Hubby, and he said, "If there are no dates or names and there isn't anyone to ID them, then they're just anonymouse people, aren't they." He's right, of course.

But now we get into my personal twitches. Mom kept this stuff for a reason, they had meaning to her. I hate being in the position of passing judgement on whether these things are worth keeping, it feels like passing judgement on the validity of her feelings. I'm not good at accepting the transience of things and the memories they invoke. I read too much history to blithely say, "This picture will never mean anything to anyone, let's pitch it." I know the odds of anyone getting information from unlabeled pictures is miniscule, but it feels like I'm erasing people from the great record if I judge their images to be not worth keeping.

I may just have to bite the bullet, say a prayer over them, and just let them go. And label all my own pictures before I get too old to do it myself and someone looks them over and goes, "Get rid of it."

I'm in that same boat, connie. I've been avoiding it, stuck the boxes in the closet. I know that at some point I'll have to purge them, and then sit down and label all my photos.

My dad's widow just sent me a book my mother put together before she died - I actually did it, since my mom was quadreplegic at that time - but it includes some family history stuff I had forgotten. I asked my sister about it and she said she has a copy too but can't stand to read it - yet she holds the rest of the geneology stuff, at least from mom's side.

How people ever pull together primary source material I have no idea.

she holds the rest of the geneology stuff

I'm not sure where the stuff my mother was working on has gone to. I assume it's gone to my older sister, but it's been so long since I've talked to her I'm afraid they'll think I'm trying to just "get stuff" if I bring it up now. It's so weird how family power gets tied up with possession of the family history documents. Several years ago I sent out a fairly extensive write up of all the information I'd found so far, and I never heard word one of whether it was appreciated or not. Well, no, my older sister did say once, "That stuff is so boring." Hello, I've spent the last thirteen years establishing our family ancestry back over 600 years! We've got colonial governors and actual pirates and all that, and you think it's boring?"

It's frustrating.

This may be too annoying/time intensive, Connie, but is there a way you can scan the unidentified, print them out, ans mail them to family members with a SASE asking for identification? Or upload all the pics to a Flickr account? Even if no one knows, you can put your mind at rest knowing that you've searched.

When my mom got boxes of photos from my (sadly) insane grandmother, most of which were damaged by the Chelsea fire, she separated everything out, had 4 copies made of everything, and she and her sisters sat around the kitchen table for several weekends making/labeling photo/scrapbooks. It was an intense experience for all of them, and they included pics which couldn't be identified as "unknown, circa 1945" and such.

Much easier if you have three sisters and a case of ale, I imagine.

Scanning them into a flickr account is an awesome idea. They don't take up the space. The whole family can access them, and they're not as easily lost.

Not having a scanner makes that tricky, but maybe I can borrow on.

Do you think someone in dh's family does?

Behold! As I pinch-hit for Lee....

Challenge #128 (cup of coffee and a piece of pie) is now closed.

Challenge #129 is desert island. (Remember -- this is non-fandom, so no LOST drabbles, please! Unless you can make more goddamn sense than J. J. Abrams is....)

Making more sense than J.J. Abrams isn't much of a challenge ....

Hey, connie, I've got a spare scanner. I'm not all that sure on how well it's working, but if I can get it up and running in the next month or two, it's yours if you want it.

Scanning the photos is a great idea. During my last visit to Hawaii, we looked through lots of old family photos, and they were really valuable to me. I'd hate for you to lose something that may matter to you down the road if you run into a relative with the info.