I seem to have whatever disease it is that plagues biographers and genealogists. Nor do I want to be cured. I only intend to manage the paper and ephemera-hoarding symptoms to save my children, at least a little, from this process of sorting in the future.
I lost myself today in boxes of my grandmother and mother's paperwork, which I had still not properly consolidated/discarded since the former died in 1996 and the latter in 2006. The task is made a bit more daunting because my grandmother had kept paperwork from her husband (who died in 1970) and her father (who died in 1963).
My great-grandfather was fairly wealthy, and he left an estate that my grandmother drew from until her death. There were hundreds of stock dividend receipts, tax returns going back to the 1930s, medical bills, receipts from pharmacy trips 50+ years ago, postcards from trips my grandmother took in the 1920s...the list is extensive.
A lot of it I can finally recycle. There's a bag of papers I will remove SSNs from then recycle, and some I will scan then recycle. Still other items, I'll keep. Because so much of it is fascinating.
My grandfather's family owned the first livery-stable in Leesburg, Virginia. When he married my grandmother, an upper-class Connecticut Yankee, his gaggle of sisters was appalled. After my mother was born, the little family moved to Colorado and tried their hand at ranching. Knowing that background, how ill-suited they were for life in the West, somehow makes me especially touched by facts like their list of 1953 expenses including $20 for "milk for lambs."
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