Today, I spent several hours going through an informal archive of someone’s trip in 1955. We aren’t sure exactly whose, but our best guess is Miss Anna, my great-grandmother on my maternal side.
There is nothing in this archive that I expect to use in the book; it doesn’t tell me anything about her life, there are no personal artifacts in it, and anyway Miss Anna doesn’t get more than a few glancing mentions in the book. But in the end, it was useful to go through it in the way that taking a walk is useful: I was stuck, and it got me out of my own head long enough for me to get unstuck.
That said, I’m not sure what I should do with this box of things once I’m done with them. There is some actual art in it, and surely somebody collects things like the advertisements or the menus into a more formal archive somewhere. I know I shouldn’t take it back to my mother’s house from when it came—she made that very clear when she gave it to me.
What would you do with a collection like this, friends? How would you go about finding the right archive(s) to donate them to, or would you instead just let them molder in your basement and then throw them away? (Maybe I’m wrong about them having value to anyone but to Miss Anna, who of course has no use for them now.)
Most assuredly do not take it back to your mother’s house.
Love, Mom
That part about not being allowed to give them back to your mother made me laugh. I, also, was told this by my own mother.