“I loved to watch Lake Huron, the storms, boats coming in to the two docks, which later were washed away in storms, so that boats quit coming in there in later years. I would kneel on the floor in the upstairs bedroom facing the lake and watch it all alone. I do not know whether it was because I was the 4th child and 5 years between Hanna and I (parents lost between she and I, the only boy they would have had) or just maybe my mother was too busy, but I always longed for affection which for some unknown reason I felt I never received.” — Annabelle Buchanan Merrill, my great-grandmother
Earlier this year, I finished typing my great-grandmother’s life story, which she started in 1963 at age 77 and continued in fits and starts until her death in 1967. She hand-wrote her story on legal-sized pads, and as I typed, I left her misspellings intact. I wanted to capture her life as she lived it and wrote it — not edit it.
That typed document now lives as a Google doc and a PDF. I’ve printed off copies, and I’ve uploaded it to FamilySearch. So what do I do with the original? I’m planning on scanning it, then others can read her story, in her own written words. Then? I know it won’t be going in the trash, but I have no specific plans for it.
It got me thinking again about one of my favorite topics: Swedish death cleaning. As a reminder, Swedish death cleaning is the idea that when we die, someone else will have to go through our stuff. We make it easier on them when we do it before we die. And a point of clarification: Swedish death cleaning does not mean get rid of everything that brings you joy. On the contrary. As a method, it encourages you to showcase your treasures, but still think about your grandkids going through the rest of it.
Swedish death cleaning and family history
It feels almost sacrilegious to write about throwing out “family history,” so put your mind at ease. I’m not talking about tossing your great-grandmother’s handwritten life history. But maybe the 20 copies of the same family group sheet put together in the 1970s can go.
In our garage, we have boxes and boxes of paper family history stuff inherited from my husband’s family. I respect the time and effort they put in, trying to trace their family lines. My father-in-law, Randall, was stymied for years on his paternal line because his own father, Forrest, lied to him about his family. Forrest and Randall didn’t have the best relationship and Forrest seemed to feel that his family was not any of Randall’s business. Eventually, Randall met an aunt he hadn’t known existed, who gave him the real story, and he was able to find the names of many ancestors.
A lot of those names are on papers in boxes in our garage. I won’t be keeping most of it.
Here’s why: It’s duplicative, in many cases, it’s not verified information, and today’s online resources are much more robust than the paper trail created 40 and 50 years ago.
The authors of the book “Downsizing With Family History in Mind” give some suggestions for what to get rid of:
- Trash multiple copies of the same thing.
- Dump copies of originals, like copies of census records, copies of headstone pictures, copies of city directories and printouts of passenger lists. All of those are available online.
- Ditch the information from people unrelated to you. Your great-aunt’s husband’s second cousin’s information is not something you need to keep. You could donate it, though.
- Tackle loose papers and books of remembrance. You probably don’t need to save any of them. (Gasp!) No, really. The information is almost certainly documented elsewhere and if it’s not, that’s what the sorting process is for.
- And, they recommend — brace yourself — that you get rid of old pedigree charts, family trees and group sheets. They write that this recommendation “generates the most considerable ire and controversy in our workshops. Surely we can not mean that the family history charts that our ancestors have handed down for generations have no value. Yes, we do in 99.9% of cases.”
What I’m keeping
After reading the news over the past week, I went back to my great-grandmother’s life story. I wanted to see what she did to get through the times when it seemed the world was on fire. There was a half-a-sentence about World War I, a brief bit on the 1918 pandemic and how she didn’t get very sick, and slightly more about World War II — but not much beyond her worry for her nephew who went to the front and then came back.
So what am I keeping? Any hint of a story, whether that’s in a journal or a letter or on a scrap of paper. I’ll keep original documents and pictures. To “pan for gold” in those boxes, it means that I or my husband have to go through them. My kids would toss each box into the trash without a second glance. They don’t get older generations’ attachment to paper.
And, I need to spend more time writing about our turn to live through a world on fire. Maybe my great-grandchildren will want to learn from our experiences.
Holly Richardson is the editor of Utah Policy.