Tag Archives: Heirlooms

Things or Heirlooms?

by thehistoryinterpreter

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.

Family Stories, Family Treasures and some Memories: a task for the family archivist

by thehistoryinterpreter

For the past few months, I have been trying to discover that useful commodity ‘spare time’ and use it to create a small website to be the repository of all the family stories that run round my head. This is rather different from the family history accounts that appear on this website. These are mostly uninspiring narratives, designed to record all the facts that I have found for that branch of the family. The new website is for stories rather than accounts and in future, these will vary from long biographies to short paragraphs about particular anecdotes from the past. There is also a section for my own memories, taken from my auto-biography. In particular, I wanted a vehicle for the stories of the family treasures that I am privileged to have in my temporary care. Without the associated narratives, these heirlooms become mere ‘things’; I feel the need to explain their significance and let others know why they are precious. Artefacts also provoke memories; memories of their owners, memories of occasions when they were in use and associated narratives.

All this may this seem self-indulgent and perhaps it is but I am the only person with most of this knowledge; it is my responsibility not to let it be lost. If I were able to see my descendants more often these would be the accounts that they would hear verbally from me but there may be more stories than there is time, so I decided that I would make a start. The website is tiny at the moment. I plan to add more stories on a regular basis but I didn’t want to begin with an overwhelming number. The intention is that my descendants will actually read this and I thought that they might be put off if I inflicted too much on them at once.

I am not expecting hundreds of hits on the site, or anyone outside the immediate family to read it much, although you’d be very welcome to do so. In fact, I may be optimistic thinking that my descendants will read it but at least now they have the option. What I hope may happen, is that others will take a quick look and be inspired to tell their own family stories. So, if you have five minutes, pop across for a brief glance at Granny’s Tales and then go out and do likewise.

Heirlooms and Heritage – Treasures and Things

by thehistoryinterpreter

Regular readers will know that, apart from my descendants, I am singularly lacking in relatives: no siblings, no first cousins, only six second cousins, all on the same side of the family. When I say that people often think I mean those are all the cousins I know about but no, that’s really all there are and they are very important to me. Third cousins and I have met two of those for the first time in the last couple of years, are practically my closest relatives. Actually, that’s not strictly true, one of those third cousins was in my class at school but we didn’t know we were related at the time.

The advantage of having three grandparents who had no siblings that survived babyhood is that I am the inheritor of the heirlooms. On my father’s side, there is very little but on my mother’s there are many photographs, non-valuable jewellery, documents, ornaments and textiles. They have little or no intrinsic value but they are priceless to me. I am very aware of what a privilege it is to be their custodian.

The way I look at heirlooms has been shaped by my recent material culture certificate experience. For an object to become a treasure, rather than just a thing, it needs to have a story, that’s what gives it an emotional dimension. The implications of this Open University article are that an emotional attachment to things is not healthy. The article says ‘Each object is associated with important people, places or experiences and they become incorporated into the self, so that the prospect of getting rid of a possession feels like losing part of oneself. Everyone does this but hoarders see deeper meaning and value in far more items and a much wider variety of items.’ I like to think that I haven’t reached hoarding level, I can still walk across all the rooms in my house. Yes, getting rid of some possessions would be like losing part of myself, although the lockdown clear out of the loft did see me jettison some of the collections that my mother treasured, although I still have many more. You name it, mum collected it, stamps, cheese labels, matchboxes, tea and cigarette cards, the list goes on.

I know I need to tell the stories behind the ‘things’ that are currently in my possession; that way my descendants will at least know what they are discarding, if discard they do, although of course I hope they won’t. This is as important as telling the stories of the family.

I really enjoyed running my heirlooms workshop for the recent Really Useful Show, in which I aimed to encourage others to look at heirlooms in a rather different way and to tell their stories. I don’t get the chance to spend much time with my descendants and rarely are they able to visit me, so I don’t get the opportunity to bombard them with stories of the family treasures that are in my home. I’ve begun working on a website that will ‘house’ both family stories and the meaning behind the objects that I have inherited. Sadly, some of those stories are already lost and I am left with, ‘this has been around for years not sure if it was made by my mum or granny’, or ‘this belonged to the Smith family but I don’t know much more.’ Despite having thought I had asked my mum everything there was to ask, clearly I didn’t. If you still have people in your family you can ask, do it now, Christmas is the season when we connect with family, even if it is only a Christmas card (yes people of my generation do still sometimes send those). Ask. Ask. Ask. If, like me, you are your own oldest relative then the mantra is tell, tell, tell. Don’t wait for your descendants/heirs to ask the questions, make sure you leave the answers for them to find.

For some years I have had an inventory that mentions what things around the house are, along the lines of ‘hideous pink vase on third shelf was Auntie Annie’s’. This does rely on me not moving things. The one I worry about most is, ‘All the Christmas decorations in the turkey box date from the 1960s or earlier’. What happens if I go to join the ancestors when they are on the Christmas tree? So, it is time to tell their stories. I have begin to work on a website that will do just that and I will make sure the information is in another format as well, a photobook would be good. I may be some time. I know the website will be of limited interest to outsiders but it seemed a good format to choose; it isn’t really meant for anyone except my descendants. I could keep it private but I won’t, in the hope that it encourages others to do likewise. It needs a lot more work before there’s enough to make it live but it is a work in progress.

I have also been helping to work on another website that I hope more will appreciate, that goes live next week but that, as they say, is another story.

I leave you with a picture of the (unfinished) patchwork quilt. There is a reason it is unfinished but you will have to wait until I tell its story to find out why. It has been worked on by four generations of my family and now my grandchildren are big enough to hold a needle without too much collateral damage, I plan to get my children and grandchildren to work on it too, so we will have six generations who have played their part.

The Experimental Archaeology Adventure Part 8: Choosing a ‘Thing’

by thehistoryinterpreter

Semester two is now well underway and the focus has turned from incomprehensible reading to the first assignment of this module. Writing an essay was so last term; now we are creating presentations. I have to choose a ‘thing’ and tell its story. There’s a bit more to it than that but broadly that’s it. Given that I can pick absolutely anything, the choice is not easy. It was always going to be something of family significance but I am fortunate that I have several things to choose from, so decisions had to be made.

Should it be the patchwork quilt begun by my great grand-mother in the 1880s and worked on by three further generations since? Given that each patch has its own story that would be too complex. I have a slide limit of five for this and one of those has to be the title. What about one of two Victorian christening gowns, or my mother’s wedding dress, made by hand from a parachute? As I write this, I am so tempted to change my mind! Then there’s my grandfather’s long service watch, great granny’s christening mug or one of the artefacts brought back by my great-grandfather from a tea-buying trip to China and India. Maybe once the assignment is done, I will tell all these stories too.

For now though, I have decided to tell the story of Caroline Jessie’s locket. I met Caroline Jessie, possibly only once but I can clearly remember her sitting in a chair in her parlour, alongside two of her sisters. I would have been seven or eight at the time. I have several reasons for finally opting for this particular heirloom. To begin with, Caroline Jessie has no descendants. Her closest living relatives* are seven first cousins twice removed, of which I am one. If one of us doesn’t tell her story who will? This particular item didn’t just belong to a family member, it was made by one. Caroline Jessie’s father was a silversmith and made each of his five daughters a similar locket. The fact that this is one of a collection of five, is another fascinating part of its story.

So far, I have learnt how to tell if something is silver. In this case there is no hallmark to help as it wasn’t sold on the open market, or indeed at all. One suggestion involves putting ice cubes on it, which seems a little bizarre. I am glossing over the fact that I don’t know where the silver was mined, or what processes are involved turning what comes out of the ground into the object I now have. I have got gloriously side-tracked researching the silversmiths’ company for whom Caroline Jessie’s father worked. It seems it was very well-known and co-incidentally, the founder shares a name with one of my grandsons.

I shall now be encouraging people to tell their own stories, tell the stories of their ancestors AND to tell the stories of family heirlooms. I will need several lifetimes.

* In the interests of genealogical accuracy, I should add that there could be great great half nieces and nephews in America, who might be regarded as being closer living relatives but I am not in contact with any of them and the English and American branches of the family seem to have lost contact in the 1920s.