Two things have prompted this post. Firstly, today and tomorrow I have two rather different, yet similar, presentations to give about heirlooms. The first is a 15-20 minute conference paper for the Family Archives and their Afterlives conference. Wednesday is a 90 minute heirlooms workshop for the Society of Genealogists. The clue is in the title. Workshop means that I will be putting the audience to work. The second thing is that I am embarking on the inevitable ‘you might be going to move this year/next year/who knows’ cull of possessions. Incidentally, because I know people don‘t like to ask, the position is that someone is desperate to buy my house but is waiting to sell theirs, so I may be here some time.

I am faced with the accumulated ‘stuff’ that survived my major downsize seventeen years ago, augmented by the additional stuff that I acquired when my mother died. Why are some items more precious than others? What has prompted me, my mother and in some cases preceding generations, to keep x over y and z? What do I keep or discard and why? Many of these things have no aesthetic qualities and serve no practical purpose, yet they ‘need’ to be kept. They have moved beyond the realm of being ‘things’ to be heirlooms. I don’t envisage that I will be disposing of anything that has a family significance. If it has already been treasured for two, three, or more generations, then it is my role to continue to do that, even if I feel that the generations that come after me may not wish to do the same. I hope to persuade them to keep at least some of these treasures. That is part of the aim of the Treasures section of my Granny’s Tales website. It is the stories that turn things into heirlooms, so I need to tell the stories. It will be a long job, I just need to last long enough for all the stories to be told. At least I have made a start.

Then there are the things that have a personal significance for me, important of course but somehow perhaps on a lower rung than the items that stretch back to touch the past. At the moment, I can’t be sure how much space I will have when I move. The aim is not to have less than I do currently, so in theory I could keep everything. In practice, it is a good opportunity to reduce the task that my descendants will face when I go and join the ancestors. I’ve made a start. I’ve done the bathroom. Not much of a challenge there. I did throw away manky looking products that have been around for years. I even threw away a few stiff flannels. My bathroom is officially the second smallest in the world (ironically larger than the one I had in my previous 5 bedroomed house) so there were only two small cupboards to go through.

Slightly more demanding were the two sheds, although the majority of the contents of one contained the possessions of the fisherman of my acquaintances (who has four garages a barn and a shed of his own and those are the ones that he admits to). I decided that I really didn’t need 200 plastic flower pots or a dozen tins of solid paint. Easy this throwing away lark isn’t it? I am actually very pleased with the shed clearance. A trailer load disappeared to the tip and more to the owner’s barn.

Moving inside, the conservatory is also done. Well, it is awaiting visits from my descendants to triage the children’s books. That will be trickier. I know most are now too young for my grandchildren but they have seen two generations and some three. What will stay and what will go? I know we will be keeping some that probably no one will read in my lifetime. I do hope my body will keep working to read them to a fourth generation but realistically, it probably won’t. I don’t see my grandchildren being likely to have children young. So they will sit in a box in a loft, in an as yet to be identified property, until my children have to repeat the triage in the future.

The conservatory also contains many inherited ornaments, some dating from my great-grandfather’s trip to India and China. They stay, waiting to appear as one of Granny’s Treasures; another culling decision deferred.

Today maybe I’ll start on the bedroom. The clothes part is easy. I do an annual cull and in any case, as anyone who has met me will know, I am not a clothes person. But and there’s a huge but the bedroom also contains a china cabinet, itself an heirloom, inherited from my mother’s cousin and we believe, made by my great grandmother’s brother. It holds more ornaments, ornaments that I have known all my life. They have sat in the china cupboards of my mother and grandmother and now they sit in mine. A few of the items reach back to touch my great-grandparents’ lives. Then there are the photograph albums. Many of these are the sticky plastic variety, containing colour photographs from the 1980s. Photographs that are fading into weird and wonderful versions of their former selves. I did have a spell of remounting these and scrapbooking them in new albums. Maybe I will have time to continue that process. Do I now take the opportunity to be selective? Shall I retain the images of people and remove the pictures of random stately homes and scenery? I have yet to decide. In any case that is for that dim and distant time labelled ‘later’. Unless my worst moving nightmares are realised and it takes years rather than months for me to complete a chain, they will move with me in their current state.

With the honour of being the custodian of the family archive, comes the responsibility for its curation and care. I also need to be its interpreter. What I should be doing of course is writing those stories, preserving those memories, making sure that I am not the only person who understands the significance of these items. Some already have partial or damaged stories. There are things that I know belonged to my mother’s grandparents but which grandparents? I am committed to making sure that the items I pass on are real heirlooms, with what is left of their stories intact.