My family’s history and story is of great concern to, so much so that I intend to reconstruct the family tree as far as I can get in order to know who came before me.
In this same sense, I put a lot a value into objects that have reached through the generations. I have china, some furniture, personal items, photos and photo albums, etc.
Everything tells a piece of a story I wasn’t able to fully live through and instead just brushed me growing up.
It gives me a sense of belonging.
As my Silent Generation relatives have been dying off, each of them has had boxes of family history - photos, sometimes dating back to early 1900s, diaries/journals, kids’ school art, yearbooks… None of it organized, few of the photos with any indication of who’s in them, where or when they were taken, even who did the art. Shoebox after shoebox of Christmas pictures. Sometimes, one of the survivors will recognize photos, but no one has ever made the effort to record the oral histories, so they will soon be just photos of strangers in mystery locations.
Organize that stuff. Curate it. Make it possible for kids to care.