When you die, your stories and your memories die with you. This includes the stories you know about your grandparents and great-grandparents; the stories your mother told you about relatives you never met; the stories your grandfather told about life in bygone days.  Unless you preserve these stories in a way that your family can access them and in a way that is meaningful, your family legacy will die, if not with you, then with your children.

When my childless Aunt Hope died I took a box of photographs stored in her closet that my cousin was going to throw them out.  I couldn’t wait to get home to see what was in them.  I opened the box anxiously anticipating what I would find hoping to see pictures of my father and aunts and uncles when they were little.

What I found was disappointing. I didn’t know who was in the pictures or where they were taken.  Pictures are of my father’s mother’s relatives who I never met remain mysterious.  Without information accompanying the pictures, their meaning is lost to me. 

I brought the box of photographs to Hope’s sister, Thelma in the hopes she could identify them.  She was helpful to a point, but dementia had already set in and I quickly became aware that she was making up names in an effort to do a good job and please me.  Taking the time to include the who, what, where, why and how of photographs may be the difference between a photograph being kept and cherished and one that finds its way to the trash bin.

Have you ever gone to a flea market, yard sale or church bazaar and found a box of photographs on the table ready to be sold to the next buyer?   I’ve always wondered how those photographs ended up in a place like that.  After seeing my aunt’s photographs, I understood why a family member would have no reason to keep them.  Why not get rid of a box of photographs that are meaningless to you?  Without an explanation of who is in the picture and what is going on, the pictures are just clutter.  Unless you take the time to organize and preserve your photographs, they might end up in a flea market bin someday, too.  On the other hand, if you take the time to describe your photographs and other materials, you will create a family legacy that people in your family will appreciate for generations.

 

When I was a teenager my mother would say,

“Your friends will come and go, but you’ll always have your sisters.”

That sentiment has been true for us.  And my mother should know.  She had sisters, too.  My family is filled with Three Sisters.  I have two sisters (Donna, Debbie, Rhonda), my mother had two (twin) sisters (Pauline, Pam, Jean).  My mother’s mother, Lena, had two sisters (Lena, Mabel, Edna).  On the other side of the family, my father had three sisters (Stella, Thelma, Hope).  The May 2016 issue of Vanity Fair devoted the entire magazine to “Sisters.”  Reading through the articles we find that often sisters are the one who has your back, they are our best friends, and our trusted partners.

Although I think my mother’s sentiment is true, I also think

having sisters prepares us to be good friends.

My sisters and I all have long-term friendships from high school.  Over the years we have made many other friends as well.  While these friendships are important to us, the bond of sisterhood has always taken precedence.  Like a marriage, we are together in sickness and in health.  My sisters attended my first communion, my confirmation, my high school graduation, and my college graduation.  I was one sister’s maid-of-honor and the other’s bridesmaid.  We are all godmothers to each other’s children.  We’ve attended all the family functions together – weddings, christenings, funerals, Fourth of July parties, family reunions, showers.  When I had an accident in 1985, my mother and both my sisters visited me that night to hear all the details and make sure I was okay.  When I had to have minor surgery in 1991, I stayed at my mother’s house while I recovered; one sister made me my own tin of toll house cookies, the other brought over a pot of barbequed spare ribs.

When I was in my early twenties, everyone from high school used to go to a nightclub in town.  The place would be packed, wall to wall, on a Friday night, standing room only.  While I knew many, many people in the club and talked and joked with many of them, I was always happy when my sister showed up.

She was like an anchor I could return to after any other conversation.

But, more often than not, I was happy to just hang with her and make observations about the people in the room, or just talk about our own lives.

After both sisters got married we started a tradition: unless another commitment came up, we would meet at my mother’s on Sunday.  At first our Sundays were quiet times where we shared our weekly happenings at work, adventures with friends, things we bought, deals we got, recipes we found, clothing we purchased.  We discussed politics, world events, and the latest scandal in the local newspapers.  We might tell each other about the movies we watched, giving a scene by scene description encouraging them to see the same movie, or telling the funny parts, or the most dramatic.
The quiet of our Sister Sundays eroded when the children were born.  As they got older and louder and more demanding, my mother set up the cellar as a play room.  Rarely was a full thought or a full paragraph uttered without interruption.  Gleeful chaos.  I didn’t see it that way then.  Then it was mostly annoying.  But I look back on those years fondly as gleeful chaos.  Sometimes our grandmother and Auntie Pauline would join us. My mother lived with Auntie Edna, so she was always there.  Woomania, my brother-in-law called it.  All the women.

The children eventually grew, as children do, and stopped coming on Sundays.  Our Sundays got quiet again.  We still shared the latest gossip, world events, and trivial minutia of our lives, but now sans the constant disruption and disarray.  Auntie Edna died in October 2000.  My mother sold the house and moved to a smaller place.  One sister stopped coming on Sundays.  My mother, the other sister, and I continued to meet and go to dinner and share our lives.  A few months before our mother died I asked my sister, “Do you still want to get together on Sundays?”  “Sure,” she said.

My sister and I still meet every Sunday.

My friends know not to ask me to do things on Sunday.  I’ll be with my sister.  When we met at my mother’s we sat around the kitchen table, talked, went out to a restaurant for dinner, then sat around my mother’s table again.  After she died we started going to the movies or fairs or art festivals.  This summer we started hiking.  Sometimes we meet for breakfast.  Usually for dinner.

My sister’s mother-in-law had a sister.  The two of them lived to be almost 100 years old.  They both died at the age of 98, two years apart.  The last few years of their lives were difficult, but well into their nineties they were fit and strong, active and aware.  My sister and I hope to be as lucky.  There’s a saying,

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

Sisters are the ones who toss aside the umbrella and dance in the rain with you.

 

 

 

Someone asked me recently what they should do with their books after they pass on?  Many of us have extensive libraries in our care that have taken years to create.  Any bibliophile can take you into their library and speak with love and reverence of the books they have collected and own.  If you come into my library, I can tell where the books on the shelves in my library come from.  Many, of course, were purchased on Amazon.  But others were bought in bulk at used book stores, or  yard sales,  church bazaars, or sales at local colleges, universities or public libraries.  Friends have given me boxes of books as they downscaled and/or moved.  What they couldn’t take with them, they gave to me knowing I would value them, and would take care of them.  Many of the books in my collection have been signed by the author after I attended one of their lectures.  Some of the books on my shelves I love and can expound on, ad nauseum.  Many others are awaiting the fortuitous day I will have the time to pull them off the shelf and spend luxurious hours reading.  I told a friend one time that my unread books haunt me.  I feel like they are staring at me all the time wanting me to read them.  He said,  “Just think of them as old friends you haven’t met yet.  Someday you will.”  I hold on to that promise.

A true bibliophile is like that.

Our books are not mere paper and ink.  They are little islands of knowledge and adventure.

The authors we’ve never met, are like friends who have revealed the most intimate details of their lives to us.  We value those revelations.  Whenever crisis has crashed on my doorstep, I go to my library and find the books I know will soothe my aching wounds, and quell my quivering hands.  At those times, my books become a lifeline.

Along the road of life I’ve met two women who gave up their libraries.  One of them I met a month after she had taken the drastic step as she moved across the country to attend grad school.  Why get rid of your books, I asked?  Why not just put them in storage?  I watched both women go through a grieving process as they spoke lovingly of one of their favorite books only to realize they were no longer the owner of said book.  It was painful.  I have no plans to get rid of my books.  My sister always talks about purging and downscaling.  I understand that perspective, but acknowledge that as long as I’m here on this green earth, there are certain things I want near me, and my books are pretty high up on the list (along with lots of favorite clothes).

Considering the great love affair we have with our books, the question remains, what do we do with them after we have passed.  If you make no provisions, your children will probably take what they want, invite others in the family to take what they want, then give the rest to Salvation Army.  Instead, you could will your books to a local library.  Depending on what’s in your collection, you could consider donating them to a university, perhaps your alma mater, a college or a local public library.  Of course if you think your children might be interested in the collection, you could stipulate that whatever they don’t want will go to the library.  You could also select different libraries for different parts of your collection – the history books, science books, and computer books to go to a college library while the trashy novels you love could go to a public library.

What will happen when they get to the library?  The Acquisitions Librarian will go through the books to determine if there is something that will fit within the scope of their collection policy.  All libraries have a collection policy that stipulates what types of books they will collect and what kinds they will not.  If there are books in the collection that the library doesn’t want, but they know of another library that collects that kind of material, they will pass it on to the appropriate library.  The remainder of the collection may be sold cheaply to their patrons, they might be sold to a used book store, or they may be sent overseas to fill the libraries of third world countries in desperate need of good books.  In one way or another, the books that have brought so much joy to our lives, will hopefully find their way into the hands of a new caretaker who will value them as much as we have.

Welcome to my blog.  I am about to launch a personal history archives business and thought it would be a good idea to begin sharing my ideas in this format.  I’ve been thinking about starting this business for several years and find that the time is finally right to get it going.  I’m in the process of writing a book that will teach people how to archive their memorabilia.  It occurs to me that most people have never entered an archive or looked through an archival box of materials, never mind knowing how to store materials for long-term preservation.

What’s an archivist you may ask.  We are similar to librarians and often work in libraries but our jobs are very different.  It’s like the difference between a nurse and a physical therapist.  We work in the same field but what we do specifically is very different.  The basic difference is that librarians care for books, and nowadays, increasingly, digital materials and resources.  The books and digital materials that librarians care for can be found in many libraries throughout the region, the country and even the world.  There are multiple copies of these things. 

Archivist on the other hand, work with one-of-a-kind materials.  We work with the documents produced by individuals and companies often in their daily activities.  Many things can be found in archives but what makes them similar, is that all the documents are one-of-a-kind and cannot be found anywhere else.  These include diaries, ships logs, correspondence, art work, and original drafts.

Think of it this way:  One of the most recent famous books on John Adams is David McCullough’s book of the same name.  This book can be found in numerous libraries and in people’s homes around the country.  You may have a copy on your library shelf.  The copy of David McCullough’s book housed at the Boston Public Library will be cared for by a librarian.  On the other hand, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, around the block from the BPL, has the original letters, diaries, deeds, bookkeeping records and other items belonging to John and Abigail Adams.  The archivists at the Mass Historical Society care for those documents. David McCullough used the documents in the Mass Historical Society to write his book, now found in many libraries.