I bet the scrapbooks people could give helpful advice.
I don't think you should worry about usefulness at all. It's impossible to say what you have that will be useful to your grandchildren, but probably not very much.
Agreed. I also tend towards Save All The Things, because Future Me (or my kids/grandkids!) might feel differently. I'd prefer to err on the side of having too many pictures, than only having a few. We can always cull them later, but it's hard to bring back what has been discarded.
If you have someone in your life who likes to do genealogy research, talk to them. You might also find that you would have been Very Interested in seeing what your grandparents did in their spare time, hear how they spoke, and so forth.
30 years from now, my kids will (I hope) be starting their own families, and I'd like their kids to be able to have insight into what their parents were like as kids, or what I and my wife are like as parents.
You might find the book 'How to Archive Family Keepsakes' by Denise May Levenick interesting. I bought it myself to read and haven't gotten very far into it yet (always so many distractions), but it seemed like it had some interesting and useful stuff in there.
Part 1's title, for example, is called "I Inherited Grandma's Stuff, Now What?"
The item doesn't matter so much as the memories that get attached to it. If you want to do this through conscious effort, make sure to use the item frequently in activities that you do with whomever you intend to pass it on to.
Anecdotally, the things that are most likely to become multi-generation heirlooms are things like woodworking tools. They last forever with moderate care, and woodworking as a hobby or profession can also be passed from one generation to the next so that the tools will continue to be useful.
This. I'm old enough to have seen how little the great-grandchildren care about things (heirlooms, family photos, you name it) that were profoundly important to their great-grandparents.
My Aunt has done a wonderful job at preserving the letters and diary entries between my grandfather + grandmother during WWII. My immediate thought is how our children and grandchildren will not have the same joy!
I only met my great grandfather once before he died, but I remember his name, and my parents still have the artifacts he left behind. He was a carpenter, and made several wooden pieces we still have, including a turtle footstool, a doll house, and a garage for toy cars. He also made a kid's rocking chair which sadly got destroyed over time. I played with all of them plenty when I was a kid.
I plan on keeping these things in the family as long as possible.
Make things and leave them behind, and hopefully your family will still cherish them. I write and make board and video games, I'm hoping some of those will stay in the family. I also want to get into woodworking once I own a home, and make custom components for my games.
Do you plan on having children? Will your grandchildren's grandchildren wonder where they came frome and what it was like?
If only I could query the daily activities and conversations of my great grandparents or query thousands of photos and movies for people, places and moments that my have been talked about when I was a child. I could understand my family better. Educate my daughter more fully and with better context other than telling her: well part of your family comes from the abruzzi region in Italy and another part comes from Germany, I think. And your mother, I don't know much about her grandparents let along great grandparents.
It's not always about us, or right now, that is important in the scope of life a cross generations. We don't always know which of the ephemeral things in daily life are worth passing on to the next generation. Sometime they ( the next or several generations on down the line ) identify or rediscover our best moments long after we are gone.
I'm thinking about building a site to allow people to preserve their legacy and I was wondering, do seniors feel that it's necessary to preserve their legacy for future generations? Do you have more that you'd like to share with your children/grandchildren that you feel they don't know?
And on the flip side, do you, as someone with elderly parents/grandparents, feel that you'd like to know more about them?
My grandmother put together a collection of copies of old letters from families who had been in our hometown for several decades and gave it copies to all of her children.
My experience is completely different. I've painstakingly scanned my family's old pictures, transcribed the letters they wrote when on holiday, and still have some school crafts made by my grandparents.
After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.
Grab all the papers and pictures together, sit down with Grandma (or whomever is the oldest person in your family), and go through it all. For each picture, document who is in it, tell stories about where it came from, record it all. When you are done, digitize it, publish it on paper, whatever makes you happy. But the time spent with the people who are around to talk about it all is not only the key to getting all the information correct, but also a meaningful way to pass knowledge around, and is not time you'll feel is wasted once the older folk are gone.
I don't think you should worry about usefulness at all. It's impossible to say what you have that will be useful to your grandchildren, but probably not very much.
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