Keep or throw away: the challenge of genealogical documents and photos

This may not be obvious, but it is a generated image and it does bear a significant relationship to the recent status of the boxes in my basement. The past few weeks, various members of my family have come and "assisted" us in working through the piles of boxes in the basement and making the hard decisions about preservation or simply throwing them away. One decision involved incorporating our greater family at a recent reunion, providing boxes of documents, and allowing them to make choices about what they wanted to keep. The real issue is what to keep. 

Over the years, I have evolved a strategy for record retention. Obviously, the number of records affects the application of the strategy. If you have one box of records and a few photos, this decision to keep or throw away is probably already made. What you have is what you want to keep. On the other hand, if you are like me, the recipient of various ancestral collections of documents and records and photos, then the decision becomes much more complex. 

Before getting started with making decisions about record retention, it is a good idea to look on FamilySearch.org to see whether any of the memories available are records that you are holding in your own collection and thereby duplicating. Photos fall into a different category, and I will discuss them after writing about documents. 

The different retention levels I have evolved are as follows: 

1. Records with obvious historic value. This includes handwritten old journals, diaries, and letters between members of your family in the distant past. The distant past for some may vary from others. In my case, it is great-grandparents and beyond. The questions to ask at this first level include whether or not the documents are unique or one of a kind and would have not been preserved by any other method or repository. Assuming that this type of document is not readily available online, then keeping these copies and sharing them is very important. 
2. The second level is a little less inclusive. It contains official documents: birth, death, marriage, and official certificates from employment or military service. The dividing line here is the issue of who is responsible for being the archive for certain types of records. If the records of any type are easily obtained by searching on the Internet, then perhaps it is not up to an individual to preserve those types of records. 
3. The third level is more readily identifiable. This includes greeting cards, birthday cards, postcards, and other items that have no actual content other than a signature. It also includes newspaper articles, whole newspapers, and a variety of documents from your ancestors' involvement in the community, such as:

   • dances
   • parties
   • vacation trips with their friends
   • involvement in civic service
   • and so forth

   
   
4. The fourth level is really, really easy to identify. This is everything else: news advertisements, receipts for payments, ledger books without any identification other than numbers and so forth. 

You may want to divide up your levels of retention differently than I have done here because of your own unique family situation. The secondary issue is also important, and that is the question of whether or not an archive would be interested in keeping and maintaining the records. 

I mentioned that photographs fall into a different category. Each photograph is essentially a one-of-a-kind document. However, you may fall into the trap that I have extensively suffered, and that is that my ancestors were either professional photographers or felt a duty to take a picture of everything they saw. I have literally hundreds of photos of each of my family members. The ultimate question is: How many photographs do you want to preserve of your parents or siblings? 

One solution for part of the problem of making the decisions is to digitize everything. Once it's digitized, it is no longer taking up space in your basement, and you may have a greater incentive to dispose of the paper documents. At this stage, it is important to carefully distinguish between unique historical documents, such as an original journal and its digital copy. In this case, the original can have an historical value not shared by other types of documents. The issue of how many photos to save of your parents and grandparents and siblings may be resolved by digitizing all the records, all the photographs, and then disseminating the digital images out to family members. 

 Finally, you may want to investigate whether or not some of your most important documents, such as journals and diaries, may have enough historical interest that a university special collections library or other repository may have an interest in preserving the document itself and making it available to your family members. This is particularly true of FamilySearch.org. Original diaries and journals sometimes have enough interest to be preserved directly by FamilySearch.

 In conclusion, I just want to make sure that you understand that we spent countless hours digitizing and organizing the records and only finally came to a conclusion to spend an extraordinary amount of time during a few weeks to attempt to control the rest of the content on paper sitting in the basement