The Art of the Family Archive: What to Save, What to Keep, and Why

The professional archivist works according to a principle called appraisal: the systematic evaluation of materials to determine which are worth the resources required to preserve them. Not everything can be saved — storage is finite, attention is finite, and the work of maintaining an archive is ongoing. The archivist's job is to make principled decisions about what matters enough to keep.

Most families have no framework for this. The result tends to be one of two failure modes: keeping everything indiscriminately, which produces disorganized accumulations in attics and storage units that overwhelm any future effort to make sense of them, or keeping nothing, which produces the clean houses and empty attics of families who have lost their material history entirely.

The family archivist's approach offers a middle path. It begins with a simple question about any object, document, or recording: In fifty years, will a descendant of this family understand something important about who we were from this item? If the answer is yes, it is worth keeping. If the answer is no, it can probably go.

By this standard, the categories that almost always qualify include: personal correspondence and diaries, photographs with identifying information, documents that record major life events, objects that were handmade or that represent significant labor, and — above all — audio and video recordings of people speaking.

The categories that almost never qualify include: utility bills older than seven years, newspaper clippings without personal annotation, duplicate photographs, and objects that are being kept out of vague sentiment rather than specific meaning.

The most important thing a family can do for its archive, beyond keeping the right things, is to annotate what it keeps. A photograph without names and dates is half an archive. A recording without context about when, where, and why it was made is difficult to interpret in fifty years. Label everything. Explain everything. The archivist's rule of thumb: if you couldn't figure out what it is without asking someone who was there, write down the answer while you still can.