Most senior citizens live with huge stacks of paper memories: books, letters, writings, and photos. Some of it is stuff we inherited from ancestors who hoped we would remember them if they wrote it down. Other paper (and now digital) memories are things we saved to inspire reflection on our past lives.

However, those paper and digital memories rarely impact the family we leave them to. My mother’s ginormous photo album was a highlight of her memorial service; it has hardly been opened since. There are ways to avoid the loss of our ancestor’s memories. For example, we are inordinately proud of having ensured the accessibility and safety of memories inherited from my husband’s grandmother, Cora Sproul Warner. Her letters and the Bible her father had carried in the Civil War are now on display at the county museum where the family had lived. Those memories tell the story of rural life in 1922; hours of hand-shucking corn, feeding a variety of domestic animals, working as a “scab” on the railroad for college money, and surviving typhoid only to be killed in a car/train accident. Other of her family memories and stories are now on the digital database Wiki-Tree. designed for both genealogists and casual family historians. (Try it: you can Google “Cora Sproul Warner” and find pictures and stories which have been hidden in file cabinets for a century, unseen by most.)

Transcribing and researching the lives of ancestors for Wiki-tree and the museum took many hours. I don’t expect my descendants or the heirs of my friends, to engage in similar efforts with our memories. As one friend despaired “When I die, will my memories die too?” The answer is “Yes, probably.” Our memories, and our immortality, are not in the written stories but in the love, culture and values we shared while we lived. That should be another post someday: What do we really leave behind?

Meanwhile, what to do with all those paper mementos? Here’s my plan: I am organizing my digital and paper files into two stacks: one for me to savor and treasure while I live and the other to share beyond my family. Thus, the holiday letters, career highlights, family photos and loving letters are for me while I live. For example, my mother’s biographical photo album and a loving letter of gratitude from my daughter’s then-fiance after he spent Christmas with us are purely sentimental.  My kids can decide what to do with them after I die.  

The genealogical and the historically significant need to get off my computer and out of my closet and onto the web. My family has a Facebook site, Wiki-Tree has place for genealogical data and memories. Anyone can access those sites; they are open to all. Family portraits can go there. My goal is to get those all digitized and uploaded as soon as I can. That will still leave a file drawer of letters handwritten in the 1890s and 1920s. The kids can transcribe these letters or they can pass them on to their descendants.

I may never finish the sorting task. That’s okay. I am finding immense joy in re-reading my saved memories, sharing with others and thinking about the paths and decisions which have made me. There is also peace in knowing that I can make some memories accessible, giving them air in which to take flight. Letting go while holding onto joy.