I have a photo book with the funeral cards, memoriam cards, or prayer cards from when someone dies
Um. Duh?
My archives of email conversations go back before the existence of the www. Of course!!!!
And for those other archivers here- besides making BACKUPS (another duh? - since every advice column from every expert on using computers who has ever existed has a horror story about NOT backing up, and the plain English command: "ALWAYS back up your work!" ) - if you actually give a darn about keeping these conversations: make multiple backups; in multiple media; and keep them in several places- NOT your house.
Your house - WILL burn down; or be hit by a tornado. Really? No; but if you don't COUNT on that- the Perversity of The Universe will see to it.
I have backups on single-sided Mac floppy disks, from 1984. And double sided. And iOmega Zip disks I can no longer read. CDs, DVD, big portable hard drives, big portable flash drives... and I store them in my house, business, root cellar, safe deposit box, children's homes...
I do occasionally throw things out, but, I've already had multiple times when I desperately needed the old backup, on old media- like the time half of a major photo archive suddenly stopped working; and when fully "restored" - was still missing most of 1998.
7
My father died very suddenly at the age of 72. He was a very skilled tool and die maker, and with a lathe and other basic equipment in his work shop, could fabricate all kinds of needed replacement parts that were otherwise unobtainable. Doing this was gratifying to himself, and made him very popular with my friends with broken down cars and equipment, and no source of obscure parts.
After he died, the question came up of clearing out his work shop. Nobody else had the skills to use it, but it also was not in the way of anything. We left it as it was for 25 years after he died. Every now and then, I would go in there, sit on a chair, and think about him. With the room untouched, it was as if he had just walked out five minutes ago, and was about to return.
Finally, the property with the work shop was sold and had to be cleaned out. I just did not have the heart to do it. I let some cousins take whatever they wanted from there (I saved some personal hand tools he had) and the rest was cleared out by the junk man. The buyer of the property demolished the house, but that is another story.
11
Good question/topic, roughly two camps. I am a 'pack rat', like Washington/Jefferson, and wish that my parents and ancestors had been. When I write about them, there are many gaps. If only I had had access to even all their canceled checks, let alone letters. Tombstone dates don't cut it. My daughter, whom I love dearly, has told me she will basically throw away everything, Kondo-like.
So, to protect my legacy, now that I am 82, though still working full-time, playing national tennis tournaments, writing magazine articles and books, and engaged in public policy-making of all sorts, my strategy: 1) scanned about 100K pre-digital photographs and various movie media - now have them organized on-line and can use them for all sorts of products viz., Shutterfly, Amazon books, with CDs and DVDs in a shoebox, and copies sent to museums and libraries. Goodby 20 fileboxes. 2) All emails since 1998 have been backed up and copied, as have text messages. 3) 350 file boxes are being ScanSnapped at 50 pages double-sided/minute. 4) Photos of anything I hold dear and originals sent off to museums/libraries (tennis trophies, report cards, baseball cards, 7,000 books, everything). Maybe my daughter's progeny will find the on-line collection as useful and fun as I in producing it and use it myself, of course.
Now if only that illustration in the article could be realized by neuro-scientists in our lifetime, where our brain could be wired to transfer all thoughts and feelings to DVDs! Someday...
5
Use "SEARCH" on your computer and you can bring up those old e-mails. If you've deleted them all, you can still find them, unless you annihilated them.
I sympathize with your lack of memorabilia, Mr. Funt, but did you never think of printing out those precious emails, or at least archiving them? I'm not technophile, but even I can do that.
3
I have a program (pre-"Playbill") from the second-ever performance of " A Chorus Line" at the Public Theater, in April 1975. If there are any fans interested in this item, I have not heard from them on eBay.
1
I am the last of my family and worry about the over 1500 photos and hundreds of mementos from the distant past. I alone know who these people in those photos are and their stories, All will vanish. I wrote the names of people on the backs of of the photos in my grandmother's collection, two treasured were of her grandfathers and step-grandmother back in Czarist Russia, but these vanished after she passed away. In a way there's a choice between knowing and not knowing, attachment to the past and freedom to journey your own road, untrammeled.
6
Why assume that the paper stuff we saved for our old age reminiscence is what our children would want to value in their old age? It’s the good old days myth again.
2
Sorry, but i disagree with the premise of this column and most of the commenters.
Dont we all have just too much stuff already? How is it a source of pride to not have tossed papers from decades ago? Isnt it far better to live life in forward motion, and not that rearview mirror?
Why not just choose say 10% of your kids’ baby pictures and only hang on to old photos with people? Today any scenary shots can so easily be found on line.
Less is best! Collect memories, not things.
4
I keep hundreds of separate Microsoft Word files documenting my email correspondences, from business contacts to close friends and family members who are no longer with us. I tend to look them over briefly (and sometimes not-so-briefly) each time I add a new email to the document, and relive distant and recent memories that we experienced together. It was always my thought that when I'm on my deathbed I would re-read all of them and then send the file to friends and relatives as a keepsake of our relationship.
1
I have almost every email and text messages from my Significant Other ... 5.5 years worth. Several thousand messages. I'm even saving the occasional voice mail message. They are the most precious possessions I have ...
3
Having experienced in the past 10 years empty nest syndrome, then the death of both my parents and my brother, I've thought a lot about STUFF. It seems to me the decision to keep, or not, really is about love. And we manifest love in many ways. For some of us, physical objects represent love; for others, not so much. Objects that include images and/or words are subsets of STUFF, I suppose. My remaining sibling cares more about images, and I cherish them too but also care deeply about words. You have to find the best balance for you, while recognizing that those you love from the past, present and future may not express and experience love the way you do.
4
Two Days Before the Moving Van: A Cautionary Tale.
A few years ago we were in the final stages of cleaning out a residence of 23 years. Our next place would be only half the size. We'd done pretty well getting rid of furniture, but boxes of ephemera--including papers and photos belonging to our parents--lay in stacks on the floor. With time running out, difficult decisions were in order.
People, let me tell you it's harsh getting rid of pictures of your folks when they were young. It hurts to throw away their letters, even the sad and angry ones. Wills and testaments, deeds, even the handbill showing that property that was lost to auction--all these things that made up the life of the last generation, they cannot be saved. You simply won't have the space.
And so it goes into the trash, and that's before you even turn to the love letters from your own lifetime, or the crayon scrawls your babies drew, and the photos of those high school friends whose faces, so youthful and untried, now break your heart.
So my thought is: Be careful what you save. Be smart. Don't kid yourself into thinking that what you find so precious will be something that your children can keep, even when they wish they could.
7
As a matter of fact-
Three years before my mother died (9-17-18) I sent her a sheaf of 8X10 papers, each with a printed question at the top: "It's 1942. How old are you, where do you live, what is your telephone number, who is your boyfriend?" as well as "What do you think of capitalism?" and other questions which would reveal her character and inner thoughts. I also included a SASE.
3 months later, it all came back, filled out, details, details, details. I had just broken it out yesterday to have a look, and it is a riot as well as a snapshot of America in 1942, but also 1955 and 1970.
DO IT!
You'll treasure it forever after they're gone.
Me? All my childhood letters, photos, drawings and such were unfortunately lost in a Brooklyn basement flood in 1999. Such is life.
55
@VicFerrari
Condolences. Hurricane Floyd also destroyed nearly a century of property tax and other records in my town because they had been stored in the town hall basement. This has caused endless problems for 20 years and counting. And it's sad to lose that old material in general.
4
See, touch and feel have been allowed to die.
We can help resurrect this by actually buying, or making, greeting cards and sending them via mail to our loved ones, as well as our business colleagues when they deserve a "thank you" or "kudos" memory.
Write more letters. Mail them. Start with your grandchildren who absolutely LOVE receiving letters in the mail ...
Buy memento boxes and keep your special memories inside them. Even an old shoebox is better than nothing.
You will never regret any of this.
2
If my house caught on fire, the only thing that I would instantly run for would be a box in my closet that holds old letters from friends, birthday cards from long lost relatives, wrapping paper from an old boyfriend’s cherished gift, a menu from a restaurant autographed by Sydney Poitier (circa 1972), an “LBJ for the USA” pin, and on and on. Call me old fashioned....
34
I printed emails from my son years ago when he was still using email and I stored them in a box with a few photos. They live a couple of thousand miles away so news of him and his family meant a lot to me.
I read recently that when someone dies, the people of Senegal say that person's library has burned. I suppose these email memories are part of my library and will be burned as well. It makes me sad to read here that so many people are dismissive of these relics.
5
This has so many implications beyond the individual. I can't stop thinking how this essay relates to Nicholson Baker's landmark essay about the loss of the card catalog. Print and digital should not be an either/or proposition-- we need both. I am especially attached to the vibrant quality of handwriting on paper-- so much is lost without that. Photos you can hold in your hands. Drawings from childhood. The comments here are gold.
6
Twenty five years ago, I spent a year working in adult literacy in Cameroon. During that year, my father and I exchanged many emails which provided a welcome lifeline to home while living so far away. I printed out and stashed all the emails in a journal book that year. My father is now gone, and that little stash now provides a lovely lifeline to sweet memories of my father.
9
There's also the problem of superabundance. Not only have I saved forty thousand emails sent from and received to my primary email account over the last thirteen years, but I have thousands and thousands of photographs, videos, and other digital matter saved on my computer and in the cloud -- saved, sometimes, to as many as four different digital archives. My wife has a similar archive. When my mother died, I was able to fairly quickly locate the whole of her -- physical -- archive and figure out what to save (all of it, honestly. I'm a sentimentalist). I'm not even sure if my kids will be able to locate, let alone access, all of my digital accounts. And when they do, will they feel like going through hundreds of thousands of emails and videos? Why would they? That forty-shot photoburst I did two summers ago, trying (in vain) to catch the spout from a whale's blowhole off the coast of Cape Cod. It's there. Long emails from friends sit side by side with brief notes to my accountant. And I don't even take selfies.
6
I wonder about all the less than famous artists who have mountains of sketchbooks, paintings and sculptures. It’s one thing to toss old letters and mementos, harder to get rid of a lifetime of creative output.
2
I went through the exercise of clearing out boxes of memorabilia, books and photos several years back, when my mom was selling her house. Prior to embarking on this work, I had given a lot of thought to which items I wanted to keep and which items I could let go. I came to this: if the physical reminder of an event no longer serves you, then you can let it go. An example: my BFF and I worked in a small theater in the 90s and saw many plays in that decade. We both saved all the Playbills, ticket stubs and programs from shows we saw, big or small. But nowadays, we see plays occasionally and enjoy them. That part of our lives is over and we no longer need the program from the production of Rent that we saw in 1999. Just reminiscing about that day, having dinner in a nice restaurant, seeing the show: That was the memory. Same with photos: if you can't remember where you took a picture or you have many duplicates, toss them. Keep only the ones that immediately evoke a sense of time or place. As for old report cards, I got a laugh out of seeing the evolution of technology from handwritten RC in elementary school to dot-matrix printed ones in high school to digitally-printed college transcripts. I kept a couple of each, in a slim folder, just because. And old love letters from exes? Recycled.
3
For years my wife insisted on printed copies of photographs which she would carefully arrange (curate) in photo albums. I used to think, why bother, we can get the pictures on the computer.
But looking at a physical photo album is a completely different experience that seeing them on a computer screen. Same with reading books. Digital presentation seems sterile and cold compared to it's analog (physical) counterpart.
Maybe Millenials or Gen Whatever won't miss "hard copies," having grown up in a digital world. But I think the world has lost something when everything is reduced to 1s and 0s and paper copies go the way of the dinosaur.
7
As a matter of fact, I do. Partly due to not throwing away things historical mentality.
Two decades ago I printed family emails out and then put them in a 3 ring binder.
For a dozen years now I have a folder, Family 2019, for instance, that I move all family mails to. At the the end of the year, I move the two files that make the folder (Thunderbird) to an archival location on the hard drive. Then I convert them all to EML formats, too, for the quick header and date reading.
Also did this with recent girlfriends.
Cleaning out our family home of 55 years three years ago I found a trove of letters dating back to the 1930's. Between Mom and her five other sibs, also cards and notes saved from my girls when they were little. I sorted out the letters and sent them to the appropriate family members. They loved getting them!
BTW, as someone who has been in computers for over 30 years, and teach a class on photo archiving, my advice is backup, backup, backup! An external hard drive, I keep mine in the car between monthly updates. And the cloud, like Carbonite.
Your family might be very grateful someday!
1
I have a different problem, I saved everything to a MS Hotmail account and after a failed login have been unable to recover my email. I have tried with Microsoft 10 or more times and they refuse to open my account to me. I lost around six years of correspondence, many of those letters from people who have died. I back my letters up regularly now, but I have found Microsoft impossible to deal with on this issue. It is important to understand who is handling your mail. I have lost passwords on other accounts and been able to reset them, but not with Microsoft.
6
I actually do archive selected emails. It's easy, just create a folder in your email application, name it "Saved" or somesuch, add what you will. On a Mac anyway, you can simply drag that folder onto a backup drive which is auto backed up on the cloud. I have emails going back to at least 1999....
1
Completely disagree. Why do you want to live in the past? Why not enjoy the moment - the baseball game, the play etc and just keep the memory? Or, keep the memento or photograph while the memory is fresh and enjoy it then, but not when it starts to yellow and smell like mildew.
While I am concerned for the new generation's lack of privacy, I think it's great they won't be tempted to clutter their homes with all this useless junk. More room to live in the moment and discover/create something new.
1
@chrisnyc I agree. I don't save anything, not even family pictures and definitely not any of the hundreds of love letters written and received during my long career in the military to various boyfriends during the pre internet years. They are no one's business and are private between the man and myself. The contents of which will go to my grave with me.
1
My family saved everything of meaning for the family. We have boxes of cards from family members who have passed on. Yet when I read them and touch the envelops I remember the sheer joy my mother had when she received a letter from her family every Friday delivered by our mailman who we had confidence that he would arrive the same time everyday.
We all have choices on how to value a memory and for some people memories are disposable.Some of us are defined by the highs and lows of life the old fashion way touching a worn report card and remembering the experience
2
We live within walking distance of a Hoarder House featured on the Discovery channel over a decade ago. Owner has been successfully in psychiatric care since the episodes aired and has done wonders with his formerly bizarre overstuffed property. One of my favorite duties in my Federal law enforcement workplace is purging the obsolete files after their official retention has expired. We spend several days with a big shred truck and its crew delighting in this destruction. Likewise the ephemera that some cling to and imbue with the magical property of evoking a long-ago day or feeling should be similarly purged at intervals. If the event was that significant, one will certainly still recall it. And its outlines are meaningful uniquely to that person...having also been an executor armed with two shredders.
2
When my daughter mentions that she wants to read a certain book, and I tell her that I already have it and can give it to her, she tells me that she'd rather just buy it on her kindle. I'm not a hoarder or collector of books, but the ones I do have are on shelves that give me a lot of pleasure to browse through. They make my home feel warm and cozy. I guess that habit is disappearing.
15
My mother saved all of the letters I wrote home from college and gave them to me years later. How embarrassing to discover that I asked for money in almost every one of them! But it was interesting and fun to read about my adventures--many of which I had forgotten--during those four years.
6
Your excellent piece evoked one solid 1950s memory- Soon after I married my family took over my bedroom closet and threw out everything including my autograph book from 6th grade and the paper program honoring the NY Yankees. My Father attended the local Norwalk event and asked players to autograph his program and my book for his daughter. I remember Yogi Berrra's, Mickey Mantle's, "Moose" Skowron's and Mel Allen's (voice of NY Yanks) distinct tall plain script letters. Memories!
1
Last summer while visiting my oldest brother I rediscovered correspondence between my mother and grandmother, born 1909 and 1886 respectively. The letters were from the early1930's, long before I was born. What a treasure! The familiarity of handwriting and word choices was wonderful but what was so interesting to me was the discovery of who they were as women before they grew into the women I knew. I am so thankful that my brother has had the presence of mind to preserve this legacy for hi children and grandchildren!
16
When my mom died she had a big box of pictures from her time as a WAC in boot camp in WWII.
I framed a few and donated the rest to the then nascent Women's Military Museum in DC.
I am sure they are in a temperature controlled vault somewhere in a box. Maybe someday a grad student doing research on women in the military will unearth them. I labeled them in case they have questions.
I any event, they are precious and historical and safer there than in my attic.
5
So sick of adult children complainers who “have to go through their parent’s things when they die”.
Getting up in the middle of the night when the kids were sick, making sure they did well in school, paying many a bill for the kids through all our years may not have been our picnic, either.
Stop making your parents or grandparents feel guilty about being sentimental. If you don’t like the stuff when we pass on, toss it, but until that or until we lose our minds with dementia, and don’t know how to be sentimental about great grandma’s Christmas ornament, leave us be.
It takes a lot less time and energy to toss the stuff than it did for us to collect the memories.....
18
I have to say, that as far as photographs go, they are distinctly more accesible, colorful, and detail-revealing in digital form.
If you have stacks (or in many cases, boxes) of old photographs, and have not digitized any of them, you have a treat in store for yourself and any member or friend of the family who likes such things - memories frozen in time printed on paper can be given new life, and colors restored, with a click of a button. I can truthfully say, with a good scanner and a large monitor, you will find you have never really seen the photographs you have long cherished.
And for you ardent photogs who kept the negatives (or positive "slides"), you will not believe what detail and range of color those old Kodachromes or Ektachromes or what-have-you have hidden. Scan them big at big resolution, and you will see things you never knew existed in those images!
I scanned one old monochrome photograph my grandmother took of our old fishing cabin at the Mississippi River, circa 1955. I was only 3 at the time, but I remember that cabin and the smell of Mississippi mud like it was yesterday. I pored over the resulting huge image, blown up on my 28-inch 4k monitor - and discovered, much to my delight, a reflected image, in a shaving mirror hung on the wall outdoors next to the water pump and wash basin, of my grandmother's legs and shoes as she took the photo. So many photos have unknown self-prtraits contained therein!
5
I think this is a generational thing. If you keep it on a cloud, you can look through (or search!) for things with a few clicks. If you keep it in a shoe box, it gets forgotten until you decide to Kondo your closets. I know many fellow millennials that prefer the digital storage— less clutter, more access. If you digitalize old pictures, you can post it on Facebook. My daughter writes letters, and gets them from other 2nd grade pen pals. We just take a picture and store the letter in an accessible way. Even children’s artwork can be digitalized and put on a plate to be looked at over Saturday morning breakfast.
2
Consider too the newspaper clippings, either those peculiar to a family, e.g. a winning sailboat race from 1936, countless obituaries, the recipe for ‘that’ jello salad, or those of great events. I have disintegrating copy of the New York Herald from April 1865. Booth was still at large.
3
Future archaeologists will view this as one of the “dark ages”. They will assume society stopped reading, writing, recording music, taking photos, etc. Everything digital will be erased from the historical record.
67
@Corbin I agree. What's going to happen when our hardware goes the way of cassette and VHS players?
9
My husband & I started dating in college in 1994. He would log into my school’s fledgling email program which was more reliable than his school’s, & use my email address to send me notes. We have a year of emailed love letters that have the same ‘to’ & ‘from’ address. Before he graduated, I printed every one, took them down to road to Kinko’s & had them bound. ❤️
4
A digital diploma, imagine that!
Article could have been written 20 year ago. Whats the update.
Hi, closing my parents’ home was additional grief. It was so hard. The whole house was a “journal.” I kept the letters, though. And an envelope labeled “These are important to me.” Inside are photos of Charles Lindberg and Rudolf Valentino! Teenage memories from way back.
But I don’t want my kids to have to go through what I did. I decided to curate my own stuff (i.e., get rid of a lot of it) and start asking them what they’d like. They’ll have to deal with what’s written, however. Like my parents’ letters, that’s where the mind and the body have left their mark in content and handwriting.
2
Mr. Funt, are you related to Allen Funt of “Candid “Camera” fame?
3
@BR
Smile! You're right about that.
5
I plan to publish my collected emails, but so far have to elicit the interest of Simon & Schuster.
2
The teens of today see their parents and grandparents as hoarders in some ways. They aren't interested in the family heirlooms and pictures, trust me i know this personally and at first was alarmed, but have to accept the new generation. I made mine promise not to let the family photos end up in a flea market for someone to buy and decoupage their toilet seat with them ;-p I also plan to digitize everything I can and hope for the best...
2
another breathless essay about how capitalist dot commers are taking us into the battery-driven future cuz lt's there! Sell!
It was about time, less paper means more trees saved
Good job, Thankx....i got a pair of baseball socks i was wearing when I smacked a homer last century
Keep in mind most millennials now don’t have a house with a garage and an attic to store boxes of keepsakes. Or other antiques - when my aunt offered me my grandmothers 12-setting China set before I got married my reaction was panic (turns out it had been lost many years before, whew - dodged that one).
But please don’t confuse an embrace of digital “keepsakes” for a lack of nostalgia. My grandfather took his own life when I was 5 due to terminal illness and left a beautiful note behind. My mother has the physical copy and has shared it with us all - and yes, it’s wonderful to see his handwriting. But I transcribed it as a Google doc and now my brothers and I can all access it whenever we want. We can read it at the same time, we can share it with our kids, we don’t have to worry about it getting torn or spilled on and yes - we can print it out as a back up if we want. I cherish it but not because it’s a “thing” in the real world. It’s because it ends with a sentence that reminds me what’s *actually* important: “Love each other.” Everything else is just...stuff.
5
If there's a really dumb outdated postcard on the lower rack of a tourist shop, bleached up just right, dog eared, cheap as can be, I'll send it to friends who still have fridge magnets and a sense of humor...
1
What can you do? I think electronic journaling with photos, videos, audios is a far superior and easy way to remember the past. No piece of paper could possibly bring me the joy than an audio recording of my children’s baby voices. Everyone remembers differently. Just make sure you back it up.
1
Hold on to your cloud storage
Yes, I do. I have a whole separate email account dedicated to archiving them.
(...the headline wasn't a rhetorical question, was it?)
26
@I also keep some of my email- the long strings back when my kids were in college, the emails sent from trips abroad, the string when my granddaughter was born...
I can't imagine ever deleting them. Up in the attic are all the letters my future husband and I exchanged while dating back in the early 70's. When my mom died and we were cleaning out her house, I came across some of the letters and postcards I had sent her over the years and they brought back so many good memories. Yes, experiences are always more important than things but the things we keep can help unlock the memories of our past experiences.
10
@Connie Martin I always love seeing the handwriting itself on my cards and letters. And the old paper smells!
8
Every year of my son's life, until high school, when I ended up combining a couple of years, I have created an album on acid free paper which tells a narrative of what we did that year. This includes trips to museums, operas, sports adventures, and visiting family and friends. I put captions in there, just like in the old scrapbooks and sometimes a bit more text. All he has to do is grab these albums, which are kept in one location and he will have his childhood intact. Since he has ADD this is even more important since organization and memory can be stilted.
2
Oh, and long rambling phone messages. I have a box of cassette tapes from the 80's which capture my entire college experience. All the urgent, funny, romantic mutterings that were spoken into the beloved answering machines. You had to go home and actually rewind tapes to hear your messages! Granted, I had to keep a cassette player to hear them now, but I do listen to them every once in a while. At that time, while living abroad, I also exchanged cassette tapes by mail with my family, long distance calling was beyond our budget. I have the sound of bullfrogs at dusk from the Wisconsin homestead I could only partially conjure while in Spain, my mother's voice calm and soothing as she recounts her week to me in the foreground of their chorus. My brother starting his first minibike and riding off while recording. I sat in Switzerland waiting for many minutes of silence for him to return, the sound of the motor in the distance getting closer and closer and then his breathless voice, so excited with his newfound freedom to travel the cornfields and backroads.
5
My wife and I keep our Playbills, ticket stubs and restaurant receipts associated the show. We also save NP guides, pins and stamps that are available at all Park Ranger stations. For longer travels, we have begun to record these events with the iPhone Journey app. At home we are using the scanner more for memorabilia. But for birth certificates and such, nothing will replace real thing. Yet.
2
Until the very recent past, we saved almost nothing. A few years ago, we dug up a parking lot and found a dead king! I find the modern era's obsession with memory hoarding to be frankly disturbing. Change and progress are impossible when we're constantly beaten over the head by ephemera presenting itself as a complete view of history.
3
Good to think about as I downsize my children's keepsakes. I want to have something concrete to leave behind and not "Kondo" their childhood out of existence.
5
@Kara wouldn't the values you pass on to your children be worth more than stuff, which eventually end up in a landfill anyway?
This is a good opportunity to thank the Gen Zers who have the courage to surrender their phones and laptops as they undergo
military recruit training for a number of weeks as they prepare to serve our great country. These brave young men and women are perhaps the only of their generation to experience the anticipation and joy that a hand written letter brings.
4
When I exited the last Fare Thee Well show by remaining original members of the Grateful Dead in 2015, folks were stationed at exit areas, offering money for stubs. I kept mine--the rarest, having been obtained by mail-order lottery--but they were folded, having been cramped in my pocket while I enjoyed the festivities. Lots of other concert goers kept theirs in protective plastic sleeves attached to lanyards around their necks--always easy to spot a yuppie.
You can buy these ticket stubs now on eBay--buyers have paid in recent months between $80 and $100 for the three-set pack. But here's the deal: They weren't very good shows, and the proof is on YouTube. It would be one thing to have a ticket for Woodstock, but one can listen to the Fare Thee Well concerts and say, meh, not memorable music. Nonetheless, hours after the concerts, pizza joints were hawking unused commemorative Fare Thee Well pizza boxes--they'd made them up special for the shows. Also, check out the price for vintage concert t-shirts by Aerosmith and other boomer bands. They're fetching north of $1,000.
I just, perhaps foolishly, spent $100 for a piece of wood I'm convinced was part of the Woodstock stage. That, actually, means something, even though I wasn't there. My folded-up stubs from Fare Thee Well mean something, because I was there. But pizza boxes? Aerosmith t-shirts for obscure tours?
We've gone too far.
“The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.” — Oscar Wilde
6
What will future historical documentaries like those of Ken Burns be without those letters that make people so human and relatable?
9
@Janet Mackall
Not to mention the decline in language skills. It’s always amazing to listen to the beautiful prose in those old letters, even from people who, in theory, did not have access to modern education. Today’s electronic missives are full of abbreviations, thx internet, and slang, LOL, and are so cold and illiterate by comparison.
3
Yes. I have emails that I received in 1999.
The only "preserve memories" I have is the outrageous amount of money charged for the program guides at the ball park. With the cost of tickets skyrocketing every season, those dang things should be free.
1
his season the Cubs have joined more than a dozen other Major League teams in eliminating paper tickets in favor of digital versions, downloaded to apps and displayed on phones.
http://www.mobile-phone.pk/latest_mobiles/
U can use the “save” function on the computers
Fantastic writing.
1
The real. The tangible. The three dimensional world. You can say to some of today's young that there is a real world out there to explore and feel....and they look at you like you've lost your mind. The digital world is too enticing. Which is inherent in the medium. We used to worry about too much TV because when you are watching it you just sit there slack jawed. We thought that just sitting there was somehow bad. Now, the screens are ubiquitous and everywhere you go there are more than ever, people who are tuning out the real world for the one on the screen. It's all a huge psychosocial experiment that we are performing on ourselves. It will likely be interesting to see how it all plays out....
2
All these digital things can be printed out and framed. Photos can be printed
My ex-wife and I amassed every keepsake, under our first roof, that we had accumulated through our respective childhoods and college experiences. Then a fallen tree destroyed not just the house, but any semblance of order in our collection of memories. For years we lugged these piled up "keepsakes" around; most ended up haphazardly thrown into a shed. Then when we separated, I had no where to put all those things. Much of it was lost in the process, and the rest of it I chose to let go of in order to reclaim my self from a failed past. Throwing away all that junk became an integral process of rediscovery and healing.
While a few keepsakes might have some psychological benefits, how many of us are slaves to junk we never review, hold, or look at? How many things do we collect because of an obligation to consumer culture? When was the last time you broke out the album of old baseball stubs? There is something to be said for acknowledging the past but not being held down by it.
2
When my father died, there was one item everyone wanted: my grandmother’s photo album with names, dates and times scrawled haphazardly, often on the picture itself. I had to have it digitized before having a draw for the hard copy.
5
What about your children’s art work? Those are physical items that should be preserved. It’s great to scan many and keep a few. Shadow boxes are a great way to look at material. I save emails. What about texts that include photos? Some of them are interesting and spontaneous records to save. If we use technology to help us, but continue to help children work with their hands, we can have the best of both worlds.
We buy too much that we don't need, and spend too little time experiencing other people and the world around us in person, rather than through a screen. We have acquired stuff, not memories for which there may be associated documents.
Then, if we do get wise to the message of the "magic" of decluttering our lives, powered by gurus such as Marie Kondo, we may have the impression that less is more and pitch more than we should of our memorabilia.
It's hard to find a balance that will connect us to memories of who we were without saddling ourselves and our children with an impossible burden. I saved a shoebox of letters from my ex-husband, thinking that our kids would want to read them one day. They were horrified at the idea. Goodbye, letters!
2
My wife and I just went through my late father-in-law's stamp collection. The process of sifting through it brought back many different memories about him--his diligence, his curiosity about other places, and his appreciation of other cultures.
It was also more immersive than something in an electronic form, which can be quickly set aside by my digitally acquired attention deficit disorder. I find myself being led from one thing to another on a computer. Sitting with these stamps--there was nothing else drawing my attention.
I also came to learn that there are far fewer stamp collectors today that perhaps 20 years ago (about 25% of the peak). It makes sense--the need for regular mail has dropped and cultures are brought into our lives through the internet. Yet there is something more remarkable--more real.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
6
Nostalgia needs artifacts. But we don't always know what the important ones will be.
Intentional Scrap books leave me cold. As they are nothing but attempts to fix memories in a place. In a scripted form. The whole Scrapping industry, dare I say; fetish, leaves me wary of those involved. Just creepy.
I prefer the random, over-stuffed, but disorganized old school photo albums. They elicit random story telling. And often include things forgotten and hopefully wholly embarrassing...
Ive found that I'm drawn to artifacts that are not collected on purpose, but were shoved in the back of a drawer or closet. Left in a box where it has no relevance to the other things in it, but was dumped there...maybe in haste, or to hide. Then lost.
An old, good quality, chipped wooden handled paring knife, that made it thru decades of family use, that I recall my mother using thru my childhood, expertly sectioning grapefruits, slicing the banana for my cereal - then pushed to the back of a drawer holds more sentimental value then a pile of photos. My dads old hammer. One of the tools my mom bought him when they moved into their first house. Our home. Its the hammer I learned on. He never replaced it, using it till the end.
I have boxes of MY stuff, all of which have some "memory" behind them, but the bulk of which I don't need, or will likely ever go look at again, boxes absently moved from place to place.
Its the odd things, the misplaced, forgotten, and weird that work for me.
7
This really spoke to me as I continue to use some kitchen items that bring back my mother and grandmother immediately. And my daughters and I had real twinges when I let go of the big roasting pan that I inherited from my mom and used for years. It was full of holiday memories.
1
I have a flip side - I work in vintage furniture and for the past 12 years I have seen so many boxes of sweet memory albums, letters, stubs, keepsakes...unceremoniously dumped into garbage bags by the heirs -- for me the idea of keeping hard copies of anything fills me with sadness. Attics and basement are filled with paper memories that have never been accessed and have no value to the next generation. The worst was a letter I found in a dresser drawer from a young man in Vietnam - it was an "in case I die" letter that was mailed to his parents on his death -- one person's keepsakes is the next generation's trash --
69
@Mary
Agreed.
I scrounge around antique stores and am always sad when I those old see black and white heirloom studio shots of people. I always wonder - when they got all dressed up that day over a hundred years ago and went to the photographer's studio, did they think their carefully set image would end up nameless, in a bin, in a jumble store.
22
@Mary
So these items go the way of all physical things -- including ourselves. That seems fitting.
That they eventually lose their relevance and disappear does not diminish their value and meaning during the lifetimes of those who hold those memories dear.
34
@Mary- I'm a photographer. My family has boxes of photographs showing at least 5-6 generations of family at important events and in mundane acts of living. Today everyone's memories are dumped in phones and hard drives. Only shared on social media, never to be touched by human hands because no one bothers to print them.
I used to write my mom and dad letters from my travels and even today when I have something important to say or I've gone someplace special and memorable. My mom has kept these letters and laments that with email and whats app, etc there are less and less. And I cherish every word written to me. Emotion and thought conveyed, No emojis needed.
You probably hardly know the circumstances of those pieces of furniture and why those written words or possibly photographs are there. Maybe by accident, maybe they were the last of their family lineage and no one to pass on to after death, and just maybe after death the next in line didn't care. Who knows.
Whatever the circumstances I would never equate them with trash. It's someone's history and to a large extent a history of not only our families but our country, our society and our culture.
There are people who collect such things, historical societies who would appreciate the donation of the written words/photos who would look thru without such a jaded eye. Did you dump the Vietnam letter or find someone who it might belong to?
You have a gold mine, definitely not trash
24
I took my 16 year old great niece to meet her cousins in Northern Ireland in November, 2017. She's very adept, of course, at taking photos and videos on her cell phone. But, when we returned, I had photos printed out and made her a photo album which I gave to her for a Christmas present. I hope she holds on to it for the rest of her life. Will she? I have no way of knowing that, but I felt better, as her old great aunt, giving her a "real" photo album!!! I hope she grows to cherish it.
3
The digital revolution will change the way historians work in the future. They will have to use content saved on digital media in the way that they have traditionally used old letters and documents.
This can be both good news and bad. They will have more to work with, but they will have to know how to read many obscure devices too. Imagine the far future when someone hands a zipdisk to a historian and says that it came from his great grandfather, who worked in the Clinton White House. Will anyone be able to read a zip disk?
I predict that something resembling a digital archaeology department will exist in some universities. There they will specialize in reading old media and decoding the files that they find there.
3
Brilliant. I was just explaining to someone today that children as young as toddlers sort, categorize and collect. The Montessori method promotes this. I do archival work, and there is nothing more thrilling than looking at notes on the sides of music. The Jerome Robbins exhibit at the New York Public Library has his sketches and typewritten notes from West Side Story. The papers are beautiful in their own right, but you also find out so much about his work process. MLB is killing off baseball by chipping away one ritual at a time. I’ve always intended to go to Wrigley Field. Now half the fun will be gone.
3
Doesn't a digital-only, no-printed-copy-accepted, ticket policy discriminate against anyone who does not own a smart phone ? How is that even legal ?
2
I note many here are archiving or printing down email.
Good idea, with the emphasis on printing down.
Not 'green', I know, but consider these points;
-You may not always have a computer or phone that can access the cyber space.
-Expensive soft/hardware upgrades are a permanent feature.
-You must buy the very service necessary to read anything online.
-It's all hackable.
-The very infrastructure needed to access anything online may be hacked, destroyed, rendered obsolete, used by governments foreign and domestic, used for political or criminal purposes.
-In other words, exactly what we are seeing today around the world and to a lesser extent perhaps, here.
But one can always pick up a piece of paper and read what's on it, free, no charge, un-hackable.
4
For my daughter's 50th birthday I typed all her letters to home (she was a prodigious writer) from her college and later schools and made them into a "book" for her. She was thrilled. She even passed some on to her college's president who requested them because so much concerned her years at Wheaton (MA).
I haven't a single letter from my grandchildren's years at college, or any other time for that matter. Sad.
8
When my Uncle died I managed the sale of his house that he had lived in for nearly 70 years along with emptying it out. I discovered my Uncle had saved every letter he had ever received, neatly filed by date in what amounted to 4 full banker's boxes and spanning over 55 years. There was no way to keep it all, because on top of that were boxes of photos, scrapbooks and other personal treasures. I haven't gone through it all, but am slowly doing so. I was particularly moved to find a telegram from my Dad to his brother, who was at University in Paris, France, announcing the birth of my elder brother :
"Baby boy, 9 pounds 10. All well. Anne is doing great. Love."
Boy, life marches on....
6
I have, over the course of several years, transformed all of my (and most of my mother's) hardcopy photos, videotapes, stubs, letters, etc. into a digital format, and I fondly review them whenever I'm in the mood. It's all backed up on an external drive and in the cloud, and now I can move about freely in the world without these boxes weighing me down. From my perch, digitizing has expanded my world, provided a sort of spatial freedom, and allowed for more connection.
Now, whenever a family member wants a photo from, let's say "that picnic we had by such and such quarry summer of 1982," I go to my files, copy the digital photos, and share.
I've created flash drives of decades-worth of photos to share with family members and friends. When someone dies, I send his or her spouse or children digital copies of letters they wrote or postcards they sent along with photos.
I now prefer everything in digital format as it's much easier to organize. Everything is labeled and easy to find. Neither fires, nor earthquakes, nor floods could destroy these memories. I highly recommend. It's much easier than carrying around a block of concrete, and the trees like it too.
1
I live in a 400-square-foot apartment with limited storage. Every item that enters my home, down to each ounce of paper, has to earn its place. There's also the possibility that my rent can rise precipitously and compel me to move at any time: why accumulate heavy things I'll have to move? I wish it weren't like this. My dream is to one day live somewhere that I can fill with as many books, letters, and photographs as I like.
4
@K. Lee
Don't hold on to that dream too hard. That space, and filling it can be a burden. And when done...you realize it was the act, not the items that mattered. Then you seek another space to fill...and so on...ending up with a lot of stuff...that you cant take with you...and ends up burdening someone else.
Appreciate the spartan way you live now...it has many lessons and benefits.
2
I’m not sure about this. I’ve been lucky in my life and career to do a bunch of memorable things, from hosting TV/radio shows to major conventions, and each came with some set of physical credentials, tickets, memorabilia, etc. I’ve kept almost none of it from the 10 years I’ve been hosting.
As I’m also a photographer as a hobby, my life has evolved to the point where I can effectively work with a digital platform to extract the same fun rush of memories, often in even greater detail than physical items. There is no confusion for me in where to retrieve items. In fact, the article seems to allude to the difficulty or recalling old emails or pictures, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only do I maintain multiple copies on digital sites, I also have a personal server I back up everything to.
Within seconds I have access to years of memories, in high quality. With physical items, I spend lots of time trying to track down something in particular (an image, a letter, etc.). With simple digital organization, I have a far easier ability to maintain a connection with these events and thoughts. And if I ever REALLY need a photo or memory to be ever present in my life, I print and frame it.
Never once have I ever thought “Oh no if only I kept my VIP pass from that TV station!” And it feels like if this article had been written to consider the advantages of digital storage platforms rather than writing them off as too complicated, we’d have a more fair comparison.
2
We have large easily accessible quickly searched collections of ephemera because it has been digitalized. It is also backed up.
Indexing is incomplete so we still have the thrill of the hunt.
I started dating my husband back in the dumb phone days, when there was a cap on the number of text messages phones could store. I couldn’t bare the thought of losing our early texts forever, so I copied them to an excel sheet. I suppose that file may one day go missing, but digital natives aren’t without our sentimental streaks.
I also have a few boxes of my grandparent’s letters from when my grandpa was in Vietnam. These seem too personal for me to read since I knew them, but maybe my kids will be interested.
1
TwoComments:
I print out emails that are important and memorable in my life, like an email from my daughter about her childhood.
One of the problems in the new e-universe is that we have too much 'stuff.' When I go on a trip, I often come back with hundreds of photos on my cellphone. They languish on my desktop unused and forgotten.
1
I kept a folder of important family emails for many years. Then one day, my laptop needed to be "reset" for some reason and I lost all my personal email folders.
My Outlook calendar mysteriously showed up on some cloud, so i was able to recapture recurring entries like birthdays and anniversaries and deaths, but i still haven't found the lost emails.
Not incidentally, quite a few apps that I paid for were gone, so that computer crash -- for which I blame Microsoft -- was really a crushing blow.
Microsoft used to recover more gracefully than it does now. We all did.
2
Yet another thing we are depriving future generations of. Yes, I too have loads of digital photos saved up, many, to be honest, pretty useless, but they exist only in digital form. I can photograph old documents, ephemera, and all the rest, yet I am old enough to know of and compare all of that to the possession of actual objects of physical form.
There is something undeniable about the tactile experience of handling objects from the past. The feel, the sound of crinkling paper, the musty odor of age, perhaps a whiff of familiar perfume on your late mother's scarf or on a letter from your grandmother that can flood your mind with memories in a way no digital representation can.
We used to save little bits of our past experience, something that can be touched and experienced with all the senses. I can remember having not just things like a show program but even a colorful airline ticket jacket recalling a first trip to Europe. These were precious items, not boxes of hoarded "things" but small collections of small items that helped record a life.
One thing else about digital everything - despite all the storage means around, they still often end up lost, deleted or corrupted. And as formats change will you grandchildren be able to see the pix from your iPhone 75 years from now? How about those "cool new" VCR tapes that replaced film way back when? They degraded to blurry nothing just sitting in the closet. We owe it to ourselves and our progeny to do better.
4
Maybe such sifting or curating is trying to understand what's important in our life. So much happens that we hardly have time to consider it.
7
When my two sisters and I began plowing through our mother's keepsakes after her death, I was astonished to find she had saved every letter I'd written to my parents between the mid-1960s and the early '90s — and it hit me I'd been keeping a journal without knowing it. The ability to relive my overseas adventures, my first date with my future wife, the birth of our children and the ups and downs of my youthful self is a gift I not only treasure but will also pass down to my daughters. Thank you, Mother (b. 1914, d.2008)!
11
We moved into a small house with little storage and curated our keepsakes down to about a box each, still much larger than the small Hershey’s box handed down from my grandparents. We kept samples of things, like a birthday card from my grandmother with her writing and her typical matter of fact greeting, Happy Birthday, Love Grammie”. We realized we don’t need the framed diplomas, college mugs and old slide rules to remember my grandfather was an engineer or that we went to college. I have boxes of slides from my Appalachian Trail through hike and have realized I don’t need to look at them and no one else really cares to see them. It’s the memories in our heads that are what really matter. We don’t personally need to keep photos and letters and don’t actually need to take photos. On hikes now, I generally take only memories, not photos. I do at times miss letter writing which has been replaced, I imagine for many, by commenting on newspaper articles.
2
You can save as much electronic communication and data as you want. Gigabytes of storage on hard disc cost pennies. Save any number of backup copies.
We need to build a 'Terminator' to get in the wayback machine and take down the HR kid who told us all in that meeting, 'change is good!'.
Not all change is good.
I have an old box containing letters from my army days, courting days, from sisters, parents, wife. Even some of my dad and his sister during WWII.
Poof.
Anyone who says email is the same is not getting it.
Everything evokes a memory; the smell of the paper, the old hand and ink, the postmark, the air mail stamp. The fact it passed through so many hands to get to you.
Gone.
The internet/cyberspace/social media are destroying us.
Yes, I use it, but we are all trapped in that change is good paradigm and we can't seem to escape.
11
@Chris MorrisThe internet/cyberspace/social media are destroying us.
Actually it is not, but maybe for you it is.
The printing press was decried too, and quite vehemently.
My thing is photographs. I keep them in albums kept on shelves. At least one album gets looked at on a weekly basis. Sometimes more than one. At 70, I can say most of my life has been fun. Photos of kids and their kids stomping mud puddles and me with them. All of us having fun. Photos of my family in good times, bad times, really wonderful times. Yes they are also "backed up" electronically but I never see those. Its just not the same thing.
3
Poignant and cognitively important . . .
In our household, we have fallen into a balanced solution. I take thousands of digital photographs. My wife picks out the ones she loves and I order prints. I keep the cloud, she keeps the photo albums.
She prints emails from our daughter and Facebook messages from our granddaughter. For a while I complained about the waste of printer ink and paper.
Now I accept with joy that she is creating a curated archive of tangible memories.
2
At least I can take comfort in the realization that I'm not hoarding - I'm curating!
5
We cherish more when we know the supply is limited.
Many years ago, as a surprise for my family, I rented a projector and used a professional camera from work to videotape the 40 three-minute S8mm film reels my father shot when we were kids. Our projector hadn't worked for years so we hadn't screened them in ages. My father had gotten the camera when I was 6 years old.
There was my sister dressed as Raggedy Ann for Halloween. She had just dressed her own, spitting image daughter as Raggedy Ann that year. Of course the memories came flooding back.
The last reel was in a little cardboard box. We never used to play that one. I assumed it was the 1920s silent movie we got with the projector as a demo. Nonetheless, I threaded it through the projector and started it moving. The image wasn't sitting right so I adjusted a setting on the projector.
There was a baby in a playpen. My niece? No. I recognized the little girl playing with her. It was my older sister. The baby was me! And there was my mother--at my age at the time.
It turns out, this was a regular 8mm film. The projector I rented could handle it but the one we got when I was 6 could not so it had never been through a projector. My father must have borrowed a camera to capture the moment but we were never able to screen it.
I did this as a surprise for everyone and I got the biggest surprise; all the more meaningful because I had a rough birth and so I didn't have a newborn photo; instead I have moving pictures!
5
Paper memories are called 'ephemera' by the antique trade.
They are, indeed, ephemeral.
1
I recently lost a good friend who died of cancer. We met in December of 1980, lived in different countries and except for the many times we traveled together as families, and vacationed together we wrote to each other once a week. When we vacationed separately we sent post cards as well. I still have the post cards he sent. However, the handwritten letters which morphed into typed letters to e-mails are gone. Probably over 1500 communications. We wrote of books read, children growing up, interests and problems. Unusual for men and probably of no literary worth. What was of value was we communicated as we all should with everyone.
1
I have both, and each have their merits. The faded items are of no good and who knows what some of these things are. The Digital items can be reproduced, and that aspect of technology is appreciated.
The larger issue is that we've lost control of our digital "things".
1
I am in my 79th year. When my children were small, I would save the contents of their pockets in a canning jar in the laundry room. These jars of importance were little treasures to them. Alas, now gone.
6
Anyone who has ever sorted through paper memories knows that it is tedious, but can be rewarding and can provide surprising or touching insight into family relationships. My dad's personal photos of his military basic training in 1937 were of value to the National Park Service, and my mom's 1936 school photos now reside in a local historical museum. Take a moment to contact an archivist or curator to determine if family papers and photos can be donated to specific interest museums, state archives, or NPS. These professionals will decide if something is of value or in good enough condition to be preserved to help future humans study and understand their predecessors.
6
In a spring cleaning frenzy, I came across several boxes of my children's artifacts from high school and some other momentos my wife had saved. Nothing really special--letter jackets, some pictures, athletic/academic awards. I sat for a hour on a basement floor going through each box--and, as this article points out---it did bring back a lot of memories. I did call both my children up--they are now in their 40's with kids, houses, etc.---and asked if they wanted the boxes. The answer was quick and unanimous ---no Dad, just toss them. I started back down the stairs to "toss them," but, decided to put those boxes aside for now.
7
I’ve got a foot in both worlds. I scan important documents, postcards I send and receive, handwritten letters. Everything goes to the cloud and, a hard copy goes into a file cabinet. I have tons of photos from over the years, in boxes. As well as scrapbooks my mother made from our childhoods, and scrapbooks of photos from vacations etc. it’s not hoarding. It’s just that what’s in the cloud is not tangible in the same way as a paper photo or letter.
In the mid-1990's, when my daughters first left for college, I ran off some of their letters and put them in a file. That burst of energy wore off as I realized I could access them online. But my previous ISPs are long dead, and who knows in what cybergraveyard, if any, those letters have been buried. What I do think is interesting is the length and extent of their letters. Few people write letters in such depth any longer, texting and face timing having replaced them. A somewhat sad, though possibly slight, loss, as technology races on.
3
I have dozens of photographs from my parents and grandparents that show lovely clothing but I don’t have a clue as to who they are - friends, relatives, strangers?
I am putting together our family tree and am learning about dozens of cousins and relatives I never before knew - why did these families stop talking and getting together? No paper record - no memory of the splits.
Life presents a mystery and hard copies are wonderful - if only people would take the time to properly identify why they’re being saved.
2
@Barbara Franklin One of my cousins started a FB "family group" which has morphed and grown so that quite a few of the cousins are now members. Some of them I knew and grew up with, more whom I've never met. I have been scanning and posting pictures that I inherited from my mother - again, some of people I know, some of strangers - going back to the 1880's or so. An amazing number of the pictures have been identified by members of the group - a person that I had never seen before turns out to be someone else's beloved grandfather. So the technological age has allowed us to ID those old pictures, and share the joy of discovering family we didn't even know we had.
I have been lamenting the loss of what I consider one of the important public documents of my life: a phone-book. As more and more land-lines are given up, what used to be a sort of "inventory" of our community.... where we could find out where someone lived, along with their phone number.... is increasingly irrelevant. I think this is a serious loss.... perhaps indicative of the general loss of continuity and community in the US....
6
vermontague: I feel the same way. I have been watching phone books shrink from dictionary sized tomes to hardly larger than a magazine special edition for the last 10 years or so. I used to enjoy having old ones around and from neighboring areas too. But I've succumbed, and got rid of most of them. There's only so much room in drawer.
1
@vermontague Indeed, I wish "local" phone companies somehow included "local" cell-phone numbers.... perhaps those who have cell-phones would be listed unless they deliberately opted out.
Probably this is related for hoping for rational government? not gonna happen!
2
@vermontague I don't miss it. Love looking it all up on the internet. I am 60 and did not grow up with any technology. I love modern communications capabilities and don't miss the phone book.
My mom died at 93 least fall after an accident. I still have a lot of notes and cards she sent over the years--tipped into hundreds of books--along with notes my wife and I exchanged, some wine labels, a few postcards from friends, pictures from trips, including when we adopted our son, pictures from our wedding, and all kinds of bits of ephemera--including emails that I printed, and pictures emailed that were printed. The family archive is spread out in the books, and it's a great pleasure to chance upon certain moments in time this way.
5
This topic is one that has been so front and center for me lately. I have been archiving old photos, sorting, putting them in albums and tossing out the negatives.(negatives!) I realized how much I missed the tactile experience of holding a photograph and the connection to the past that a digital photo doesn't quite do. A friend who came to visit me recently sent me a book she had made of photos of her trip. It was a physical tangible object that I look at and enjoy far more than the photos on my screen.
Maybe I'm odd or old, but I feel sad that people will no longer have those physical letters written by hand. Where is their collection of love letters? A note my husband sent me when we first met with a drawing on it, is now framed. When my mother died I found a letter, a draft of a speech actually, that explained my mothers spiritual awakening, her call to fight for human rights. I felt so close to her then. She had a very distinctive hand, cursive, that was uniquely hers. A type written letter never has the same soul.
Something is being lost, a physical connection that we get thru objects is very different than a fleeting flash on the screen.
10
I have family video going back to 1934, but as you can imagine that one is silent. In fact all the 8mm movies my father shot are silent and it wasn't until the 1980s when I started renting VHS cameras that our family videos got sound and really came to life. Now I shoot video on my iPhone & edit the clips into little music and voice filled movies which are way more informative and entertaining than old ticket stubs, playbills or letters. Times do indeed change some aspects get worse, some aspects get better, if you manage to adapt I guess.
2
To the person who suggested I "tame my IN box" using folders, I do that. I meant taming the total count of emails in a particular account. I would really like the ability to automatically convert emails between me and any contact to a neat, chronological record in the form of a word doc.
1
When Mom died, I hauled home three trash bags of paper, including my grade school report cards and every postcard my brother and I sent from camp. This camp required us to send a card every day, even though we often had nothing to say. Six years of camp yields lots and lots of cards saying "I'm having fun" and that's all. I can't throw them out. Maybe someday my kids will be more rational.
2
I'm not ready to panic just yet. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. I don't expect to look back on Facebook in 40 years with the tender fondness of a well worn scrapbook. I expect to look back on Facebook and say "Ha! Remember when people used Facebook?" I treat my meager archives accordingly. I take a different approach.
We live in a increasingly digital era. I take my cues from data storage experts. I set up a home server with a redundant array of inexpensive disks, or RAID, as a means of fault tolerance. I'm not losing my pictures if a hard drive fails. Added bonus I got to design the file structure myself. I know where to find everything.
For the really important stuff, I put together thumb drives and give them to family both as gifts, they can print what they want, but also as a means of offsite non-cloud storage. If my house burned down, another copy exists on a drive I can access. For legal documents and that sort of thing, we'll usually do the above and throw a copy in dropbox as well.
Otherwise, we just print the photos we want and hang them. We do keep some tickets and playbills but not everything. Funny, some of my best memories were when the camera died. There's no record at all except in our heads because no one else is there when we go camping.
I've gotten in the habit of picking up a small rock on each trip now. Nothing special. Just whatever is around. When I get home, I sharpie the location on it somewhere. That's keep sake enough.
1
I'm now retired and have recreated much of my life by going through 50 years of my father's diaries, and 30 years of his letters to me (from when I got married @20 until he died), as well as well as 35 years of marked up calendars from the past 35 years (I can't believe I never kept a diary)...there are other diaries, letters, photos, etc. too numerous to mention from his parents, grandparents, etc....it's great to see a digital marriage certificate, or other record on Ancestry, but much better to have the physical item...I think my son will be that much poorer for not having much of a record of my (or his) life...
2
I've saved over 100,000 emails over the years, both business and family correspondence. I'm not even sure why because the likelihood of going back and reading them is pretty low. I guess I see it as a research archive.
Since I left NYC and the country of my birth 30 years ago I have written letters to family and friends all those years. I made copies of them and this includes emails and their responses as well. This archive of love is in the thousands. I have a memory box and many photo albums reaching through the decades of not only my own life but the history of my entire family. I have pictures dating back to 1907 from both my great-grandparents and my grandparents and pictures from their lives and other days lived in tickets of their adventures.
Recently my father (93) came for a visit and brought with him all the letters that my beloved grandmother wrote to her mother and my mother. Crisp and brown and fragile with age. The letter that she wrote describing the meeting of my mother and father is hanging on a birch branch decorated with colorful woven threads and silver dollars attached—my great-grandmothers favorite. I have saved these precious tokens of love and they are filled with history and meaning.
There is a store in the city I live near filled with the lives of people no longer living. I think each time,“this is where lives end up, strangers buying things which no one wants to cherish any longer” The letters especially are poignant -works of art. Yes, it was truly different when people viewed writing as an art form. As I’m a book artist I often use the things that I find in my work. That way it will last forever and take on a life of its own. Words are all we have.
5
Sometimes a non-tangible visual cue can also be effective: when I saw Peter Funt's name on the by-line, I was vividly reminded of the times I saw his father riding on a horse-drawn cart on the road where I grew up (Alan lived just up the road). Of course, he was a well-known TV personality, so the moments stand out. Yet they are as vivid in my mind today as they were five minutes after the experience.
Mr. Funt has captured this world in a few paragraphs. I am late eighties, look back to a different world, a better one than this in many ways. Not nostalgia but a realization of what has been lost. Progress? Maybe. A better world? No.
Jim, Wilmette, Il.
1
Evanescent digital mileposts are perfectly aligned with the new society. People are disposable numbers in a Wall Street zoo, fed once in awhile but otherwise consigned to have their daily social interactions with computers, not other humans.
I am an ecologist with something of an obsession with the history of my science. One of the most wonderful things about the 19th century is that back then scientists wrote letters, LOTS of letters, and they kept them. As a result we have a treasure trove available that allows us to understand both the people and the science of a critical era. Darwin and his best friend Joseph Hooker wrote to each other just about every week from when they met until Darwin died. In their correspondence we can see Natural Selection come alive, Biogeography gaining a sure footing, the beginnings of modern Ecology... I very much fear that folks 200 years from now will look back and not know us at all in the vast void of our tweets..
4
@John Anderson
Yes! I just visited Melville’s Arrowhead! thrilled to see actual ink on actual cherished paper, next to bird quills. imagine waiting for a letter, in the dead New England winter. That’s valuable, it roots you into an ecosystem. seeing Virginia Woolf’s Handwriting, placed next to Joyce’s in a museum: fantastic. Expressions of self passed through ink is evolutionary & primal.
2
My now husband and I met through an online dating site in 2003. I have saved the emails of our very first correspondence, before we met in person. I haven’t done so yet, but I’ve thought about printing them so I can make sure they’re not inadvertently lost to me.
44
Do it now while you're thinking about it. @KitKat
5
At the time she moved to assisted living, my Auntie Alice's attic was home to boxes of family letters, and I became their new guardian. They included 1,400 letters my father had written home from his ships in the Atlantic and Pacific during WWII.
Letters from WWII, the Depression, and the era when the males of the family sold furniture door to door have introduced me to family members I never knew and allowed me to know my own father in his youth. I hope they will also introduce my father to those in the next generation who never knew him at all.
I am now using the letters - and those he received from families who grieved with him after the deaths of his men at Guam - to write a narrative of his WWII years. I can't imagine that digital copies of these letters would have the impact of seeing the real thing - my father's handwriting in ink pen, the code he used to tell his family where he was, the photos, the censor's mark stamped on a rough paper envelope. Can emails saved in the cloud convey the effort, hardship, and attention involved in sustaining such correspondence?
5
And what about those old photo albums? A cloud full of trillions of selfies will never compare.
2
One of the pleasures of typewriters is corresponding on paper with other typists around the world. I get a couple of letters a week, and file them in an accordion file. They are durable, tangible, unique ... and unhackable.
3
@A reader My 24 year old son uses an old manual typewriter to type letters to his girlfriend and others. I love the clickety-clack sound of his typing, which takes me back to when I used one of those myself. But it is a lot easier to use the keyboard I'm using now!
Remember answering machines? My Aunt Anne's voice was on the family machine. The day she died, my uncle erased it and replaced her voice with his. I would give almost anything to hear her voice again. Even her voice saying nobody's home. In the digital age, nobody's ever home. My friend Margaux saved every tape from the first answering machines, and her father would call her ever day to share some anecdote, or just to tell her he loved her and how proud he was of her. Now she has boxes and boxes of her father's daily messages, his voice, just his voice is enough to let her know all over again that she is loved and admired.
4
My parents, refugees from Nazi Germany, were prodigious letter
writers who tried hard to keep in touch with their scattered friends and relatives around the world, including some who ended up in death camps. Some of these letters contain pictures of people I don't know. What to do with these letters when I am gone is a problem for me. I believe they are holy.
135
@A. Stanton
Your parents' letters sound important. Contact a university library/archive that holds collections on Jewish history or, specifically, a library/archive dedicated to Holocaust Studies (e.g., the Holocaust Museum in DC) and ask for advice on where to place your letters for safekeeping and future generations' knowledge. If you're concerned about losing touch and access to the letters, you can insist that the library where you place them provides you with surrogate copies and/or access. And if you don't want to part with the letters now, you can arrange for the letters to be deposited with the library you choose upon your death. Importantly, too, libraries can advise you on how to store and care properly for the letters now, while they're in your possession. I hope you'll consider partnering with a library to ensure your family's letters and legacy can be preserved.
33
A Holocaust Museum or your local Jewish Museum would treasure and preserve these so they could continue to tell these important stories for generations.
12
@A. Stanton
Many the local Holocaust Museum would find a place in their archives.
7
This is why I have to have tangible copies of the first three Star Wars films, the original versions, and a player to watch them. Relying on digital copies, one is always at risk of losing them if their copyright holder loses the rights, or if the device on which they are stored fails without a backup. A tangible copy is mine forever, as long as my player works. (A risk all by itself, but less than losing a digital version, I think.)
I am interested in how we are not meant to keep every memory --- but the digital world, in some ways, supports keeping/archiving (unless we delete messages.) What I am saying is hard to articulate, but has to do with how we used to choose what we wanted to keep, and now so much digital junk exists in our digital spaces that it would be a full time job to start deleting... then since we don't we are left with a "collection box" of stuff we would not normally have around..
1
My concern is the fact that no one writes letters anymore, which are a very important source for historians researching important people.
One of my favorite composers was an inveterate letter writer to his wife, and left behind enormous numbers of letters which gives us incredible insight as to what was in his heart of hearts, which explains much of the impetus to his music.
Such information would probably have been lost had he been using email! Thankfully for history's sake, he died in 1911.
3
My mother used to write her shopping lists on the back of old envelopes. That always made me laugh because she was a product of the Great Depression where nothing was wasted.
After she passed away, I was looking through stuff in a kitchen drawer. I found a ton of these grocery list envelopes. I kept every one. My husband has asked me why and I said "It's her handwriting. Even though she had hand writing like a serial killer, it was a part of her. If I threw them out, it would be like throwing a part of her away." I realize that sounds silly, but I want and still need that physical connection with her.
8
Despite the overwhelming amount of Digital-is-Better responses, I am in the camp of preferring tangible records and mementos. I admit that this likely has a great deal to do with my work as a traditional illustrator- in other words, I work with ink, paper and other old world materials, eschewing digital technology. I like the feel of transcribing my ideas in a traditional way. But even more so, having lost more loved ones than I care to ponder, there is something very powerful about holding their handwritten letters and cards, even little notes tucked into books. That their hands held and wrote these offers a beautiful connection to them.
4
And the more we save electronically, the more we lose.
Data archaeology is a nascent field that seeks to extract primary evidence from bygone media and hosts.
Sometimes the issue is one of obsolete media, e.g. the then-modern notched copper coils that captured the audio of Balkan bards, key materials from the field surveys of Milman and Parry, whose early 20th Century work taught us what oral tradition is and what Homer truly signifies as a cumtural artifact. Those coils, however, sit in Harvard’s collection, inaccessible in every way.
Or, the economic obsolescence of platforms. How many once put their lives on display in Prodigy or CompuServe?
Data archaeologists succeed in some measures, but concede that much will remain lost. Most, actually.
The arguments for the codex remain as compelling now as they did in the Middle Ages. Thankfully, ours progressed to paper, as vellum can get malodorous on a hot, humid day.
But besides the restoration of memory, there is an intentionality that is absent in digital media. When we write something by hand, we mean it. When we print a photo and place it in a frame or album, we want that moment to live with us daily.
Now we have thousands and thousands of images in iCloud, vel sim., that we are afraid to delete forever yet indifferent to greater commemoration.
4
All the family memorabilia has been left to me. Letters and photos going back as far as 1885. In have no children so I am sending these keepsakes to my sisters and their children. It makes me sad to know when I am gone these things I treasure will be tossed in the trash. Objects like these give you a sense of where you come from which the younger generation doesn’t seem to value as much as my generation.
6
Almost 40 years ago, my girlfriend left for 2 years, then 2 more of grad school on the other side of the continent. We have a suitcase full of love letters. There was no internet. We will open a good bottle of wine and that suitcase when we retire.
5
When my in-laws passed away, they left shoeboxes full of old photographs of people they knew. No one alive today has any idea who the people in the photographs are. Once, they were memories. Now they are just meaningless artifacts, completely devoid of any larger context. Sad, perhaps, but time marches on and memories always fade.
2
As a retired former tech person, I straddle both sides of the digital divide. After retirement, I have worked on downsizing all the stuff that we have collected over the decades. I take pictures, scan and otherwise digitize many things. I have been scanning movie tickets, with titles that indicate who attended, even before retirement. You can digitize your life, but it takes a bit more effort. But no, I don't save most emails, just a small fraction (including the entertaining ones). Of course, you must backup your digital treasures (I have multiple copies, one offsite). It is liberating, but hard work.
I do like handwritten things, but every e-mail program has a search option. I have hundreds of random e-mails from a friend who passed away, and they're not going anywhere unless Yahoo goes belly up with no warning.
Simply because you don't know how to access these digital memories doesn't mean they don't exist somewhere. Go to your local campus, hire a computing science student, get to work looking. If you still have the old devices, if you still have the old diskettes and tapes the memories are getable. Also ask your kids, perhaps they backed them up, or have them without giving them a seconds thought. There are digital pictures I have lost track of, but I have contemporaneous ones that help fill the void.
19
the digital world has many benefits, but there is a danger that I, individually, and we, collectively, are losing a sense of perspective by distancing ourselves from our own past. Also, how much more convenient will it be for authoritarian societies to brush over the past; to rewrite history according to the political necessities of the moment. We--Oceana--are no longer at war with Eurasia; we're at war with Eastasia and we always have been.
2
I throw the good, save-able emails into a folder - for posterity.
1
I clipped the article, copied it and sent it to my kids. Maybe an attachment will last longer than a forwarded link!
What are you going to do?
Times are a changing.
We are not a culture anymore that dwells too much on the past.
2
My parents saved my letters from my Study Abroad year in Germany. My impressions of crossing the Wall into East Berlin brings back frightening memories that no history book can revive. It is a shame that our past may become like a desert's shifting sands that can only be recovered with super computers AI looking thru digital records.
2
Email is impossible to lose...It’s always there...my wife and I can trace every message we ever sent from first contact to request for hair dye...
28
@Bobby And McGee. "Email is impossible to lose..."
The same is true of the digital photos from long ago vacations. They will never become tattered and faded.
3
@Bobby And McGee
Yahoo lost a few years of my email. And email providers don't make it easy to transfer online folders to offline folders. So sorting personal emails online into folders becomes hard to store offline when the inbox is the only accessible or transferable folder you can dump from.
6
@Bobby And McGee I'm pretty sure it will it will disappear one day ...
6
Though electronic photos may become 'lost', the same medium is pretty wonderful at restoring tatty oldies. I've many, kept on the computer & printed out large - showing far more of the scene & making people look real & not mere tiny hobbits in postage-stamp monochromes. Some even framed. Some, indeed, with added colour, done always with taste & discretion, of course..
1
Photos, especially the really old ones, are like a time capsule to future generations for them to interpret and connect with family history that they only hear about in often repeated (and often very embroidered) stories that still make people laugh no matter how often they've been told. What I love is going through the old photos and flipping them over to see if anything was written which there often was. When my father was still alive I showed him a B&W snapshot of our Cousin Ahmad smirking in front of a palm tree with a smidgen of a cornice in the upper left corner. On the back it said "Ahmad in front of a palm tree" with no further info. When I asked him where it was he confidently replied "..that's in Libya, I'd know that palm tree anywhere". I just let it go but to this day, I replay that looniness in my mind and it still brings a smile to my face which I think is one of the great gifts of photos and keepsakes. Years later, I did find another photo of my Dad in front of the same palm tree so guess what, he was right!
1
Long before any sort of hand-held computer, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about the best way of preserving information. He anticipated such electronic devices and, after weighing the pluses and minuses, concluded that a book, requiring no energy, still presented the best means of archiving data. We still have papyri from 4000 years ago, but go find me something that can read a floppy disc. Ironically, this goes hand in hand with the frantic multiplicity of digital images. When people now snap photos, there is no "curation", just an endless agglomeration of stuff, stored somewhere, which to be honest, is never looked at again. The people who fall over the side of the Grand Canyon while taking a selfie, will be happy to know that even that stupidity will be lost to memory within a few short years. Fortunately, the lives of most of our intrepid online autobiographers are so vacuous, they are not worthy of preservation in any case. It is the people who actually have something to contribute that worries me.
1
I have a ticket stub from a 1959 LA Dodgers - San Francisco Giants games my parent took me to when I was 7 years old. It is nice having it But I’d much rather have taken selfie.
Hhhhhmmmm. I find people are so busy photographing every minute, that they only watch events through their phone. Just because he couldn’t figure out how to save a file of letters from kid @ college, doesn’t mean we’re all going to lose everything.
And what will the historians and biographers of the future use as the basis of their work?
On Ancestry.com you can put up family trees with galleries of pictures, clippings from newspapers, marriage licenses, etc., etc.
If you make your family trees public, relatives can copy the scanned pictures and documents to their own trees.
In your will, you can ask your executor to keep your family trees up for as long as you like, so as many people as possible can copy your information.
Not as good as the hard copies, but better than nothing. Seeing an ancestor's signature on a draft card from WWI is thrilling. Seeing the enrollment record at Oxford from the 16th century? The map of the farm a parent grew up on, with its creeks and neighbors noted? The disability claims of an ancestor who fought at Missionary Ridge?
more troubling and threatening to knowing our own history is the demise of morgue files.
with each shuddering of a small town or regional newspaper the history documented by that paper and preserved in its morgue file disappears for good.
with the shift to exclusively digital publications we have already lost the documentation of events from 911.
scrubbing of the internet has caused the disappearance of reporting on the Mossad agents who were dancing on top of their front company's moving van on the Jersey side of Hudson while the towers burned and collapsed.
thorough reporting by ABC's John Stossel for 20/20 and Brit Hume's multi-part investigative report for FOX have disappeared from ABC's and FOX's archives no longer to found archived anywhere on the internet.
I was absolutely horrified when my college email account was deactivated. My cousin and I had emailed back and forth constantly - it was before we both got cellphones - and in losing my emails I essentially lost my diaries of my college years. It was dumb of me not to back them up, but at the time it never occurred to me that something stored online could disappear.
I delete all emails that read older than 3 months.
Have been doing this for 20+ years.
No regrets.
2
This seems more a tale of incompetence than anything else.
Personal data such as emails and photographs don't just disappear (sorry, I'm not counting ticket stubs etc as personal data; the proper term I believe is "clutter").
Personal data is lost because of poor or absent data backup practices.
Get your act together and develop good backup strategy and practices, and these data will stop "disappearing".
1
Blah, blah, blah...I’m 50 years old. Old enough to have fond memories of the shoe boxes of pictures, an old letters from overnight camp that our parents keep. But, just as the manuscript calligraphers lamented the decline of civilization with the invention of the printing press, again I read another article about how a change in technology is going to bring an end to civilization as we know it.
Guess what, civilization isn’t ending, its evolving. This same technology allows journaling for everybody, not just those with a pen and paper journal, for what is a social media post of not a journal entry. This same technology allows photography for everybody, not just those with resources for film and development, thereby increasing the ability for future generations to see our everyday world today.
Just like no one today misses a parchment letter with wax seal, no future self is going to miss paper letters and physical photos, they won’t know of such a thing. But what they will have is words and images from everyone.
2
Having recently had to sort, file,and donate the estate of my 92 yr old aunt, I swore that I would not put my own children through that. Since January, I have been immersed in a mixture of KonMari and Swedish Death Cleaning. Sorting and freecycling useful but surplus objects has allowed me to review, reminisce and part with things that take up lots of physical, and emotional, space in the house that my husband and I have happily shared for 30 years. Most of our digital photos are on a portable hard drive and a future step in my culling process is checking the contents of a shoe box of computer discs (yes, we still have a functional floppy drive) and transferring them to the portable hard drive as well.
The now much smaller boxes of preserved physical memory objects in our house are now both dearer and more manageable.
3
My family doesn’t have a tradition of handing down papers to each other. When someone passes away the objects are few if any. I am fascinated by those who do...and I don’t think I’ll be inventing that practice in my family except maybe for jewelry and other decorative objects.
My mother passed away decades ago, before I got married, had children and received an M.A in Education. More importantly, she died before she and I ever had the chance to get to know each other as people. She left a journal entitled "The Scribble-In Book," in which she wrote about her life, her feelings and what was going on in the world. It covers the period of time from 1938-1948 and it is a fascinating read, especially the years covering WWII. I got to know her as a human being from reading this priceless little treasure, and I cherish its existence. I recently transcribed it and gave a copy to each of my three children so they could get to know their grandmother whom they never met. They've each remarked how amazing it was to see themselves in her writings about everyday life and how she viewed the world and her intimate relationships with family and friends. I don't write but create art journals that I hope my kids will enjoy after I've shuffled off this mortal coil. Some things cannot be replaced by digital technology!
4
While I sympathize with the author, I do think that younger generations including myself at 34 can save and keep email. I have never deleted a personal email and they are sorted in folders in a way that I can easily reread old emails from friends and family. They also take up very little space in my small apartment. So what’s the difference for me? Ticket stubs I get. I might miss those. Thrilled the letters come digitally though.
I found a rare handwritten letter from my late husband to his family during his time in the Army - he enlisted during the Vietnam War. I wish I had more of those letters now. We lived together and he never had a reason to write to me. He was not a “man of letters” by any means, but seeing his handwriting and thoughts about the Army is a bittersweet glimpse into a part of his life that was before our time together.
I've never been able to keep a journal but I was a prolific letter writer for many years. In high school I moved from passing notes in class to a longform love letter relationship, and when I went to college I wrote to friends and family, and they wrote back. I still have many of these letters, 40 years later: all the love letters from the teen beau (beautifully handwritten on spiral notebook paper), letters from traveling friends, a handwritten poem. I think I was inspired in this direction by my mother, who had beautiful handwriting and was also a letter-writer. Now that she has dementia, looking at her writing in old cards and letters is a special window into our past. Handwriting to me is the language of love.
3
From the time I went to college in 1975, my father wrote me letters, sometimes as often as once a week, until his death 17 years later. During that period, he remarried and retired. I'm in the process of re-reading these letters, an incredible gift that offers both nostalgia and insight as I near the end of my own life. It's like taking a trip in a time machine oiled with love.
3
I am a scrapbooker. I have been a scrapbooker since before anyone even used that term although the ones I started when my oldest was born was the beginning of the artsy scrapbooking craze which I locked on to with both hands. I probably have over 60 scrapbooks of vacations, events and everyday life since he was born. Recently, I put every photo and bit of memorabilia from my childhood into scrapbooks, documented my college years and am moving on to law school, marriage and life with my husband before kids. I made books for my children and only just finished the last traditional scrapbook for my younger son who is now 23. I will continue to make them for my boys online as long as they continue to put photos where I can get at them. When my youngest spent a month in London, he brought back a three-inch thick pile of memorabilia. I trained my boys well.
And I keep their emails and our text threads go back to when the oldest left for college - in 2012.
It can be done. It just takes a little effort.
As for tickets? That is truly a tragedy!
3
I had a great correspondence with my daughters when they were in school. We exchanged letters twice a week and they were long, and funny, and full of news and ideas. Several years ago I went to retrieve them and print them out and I couldn’t... they were composed on an old (current at the time) IBM PC software DisplayWrite. Try as I did, I never found a way to convert the files into readable text.
All these letters and notes are now gone along with a part of our family’s history. Nothing digital is permanent.
1
Along with this: LIBRARY SLIPS. Oooh, as a child, did I love seeing other peoples’ handwritten signatures, knowing that they too, had turned the actual pages of Anna Karenina or Auden. Sometimes, a “John Updike” would be written in, or my neighbor, and then could ensue a conversation about the book. The fact that my library didn’t remove any of these slips but simply stapled on another layer made it all the more Jurassic, tactile, sensual. Reading then became a feeling, a lived moment, a whiff, rooted in deep time.
13
I've always printed out e-mails, tossed the work-related before retirement, but have always saved the personal unless totally mundane (when to meet for lunch, etc.).
When our son died 8 years ago my wife started a search for his voice. Yes, we have old videos and recordings but those were of a younger age. There was nothing of him at 25, when he passed.
I received and erased a voice mail from Matt at my office weeks earlier but was unable to retrieve it from my company’s voicemail server. Ultimately there is no recording of his voice to comfort us and hold on to.
It is not always just printed materials that are precious. Sometimes the simplest thing, such as the sound of a voice, is a treasure on its own.
11
Humans collect stuff.
After we collect stuff, we build places to keep our stuff.
After that, we grade stuff. My stuff is treasure, but your stuff is junk.
My cloth with paint splattered on it is art, but your pants with paint splattered on it is garbage.
Until my art is deemed a forgery, and your pants were worn by Pollack.
Humans collect stuff, not because it is valuable, but because it seems valuable.The NSA Utah Data Center is a grand-scale example of that. They store electronic data, like emails, for the same reason my dad stored old newspapers; one day it might all be useful. Not now. Not tomorrow. Someday.
Stuff.
Fine. Some people collect their parents' paper photos and handwritten letters, but Stephen Hawking's heirs don't have many handwritten letters to collect. Like me, they have typewritten documents. My dad wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper, when newspapers weren't online. Like this one.
So, humans will continue to collect stuff and defend that habit against all comers. This stuff reminds me of dad, of grandma, of Cousin Jim, who went to Paris in '43, after the war. (Stuff doesn't have to be accurate.)
When you're convinced that this stuff must be saved to keep order in the universe, remember this Ozymandias -- all of your stuff will burn and decay and disappear from the World. Even your world will disappear.
That's not a bad thing. 13.8 billion years of stuff-destruction has taught me that.
After all, you and your stuff are made of destroyed stuff.
5
@CgatesMD, thank you for the perspective! I remember similar (alarming at the time) thoughts entering my mind as a tender-aged college student taking a course on the history of the Old Testament. Layers and layers upon civilizations lost. Still, I will keep a ticket stub when I get one.
I have to disagree on this one. My ticket stub to game 5 of the 2016 Cubs world series game sits in a drawer, never looked at. All the photos I took of this special time with my father are actively replayed on a digital picture frames along with other cherished times from my life. Sadly I don't have nearly the treasure trove of captured memories from pre-digital times, especially of my parents and my childhood.
Both as a human being in relationships and as a bit of a history buff, I too have wondered about what folks will do for memories and for evoking the past.
When my Dad died, I found in his attic a shoe box of letters that his mother had sent him during WWII. They were fascinating to me adding information about who my grandmother was as a mother, but also clarifying family information.
On the other side of the family, a typed note one of my uncles had written while in Italy during WWII was a wonderful window into his experience as a soldier (that uncle came home with what we now call PTSD and died by time I was a teen).
As I scanned all the family pictures recently, I held hard copy photos which were as much as 100 years old. The dvds I gave to family members will likely be old technology in a few years and likely unreadable shortly after that. I fear that all those digitalized photos will simply be lost unless folks are attentive and take time to do the work of updating to new technology.
Still, they will not have the experience I had lately when I removed a 1954 school pic of myself from an old frame and found behind it a pic of two of my uncles as tots. It was taken in 1918 and framed with a newspaper from December of that year - what a treasure! How wonderful to know that my beloved grandmother probably put the pic of her tots in that frame 100 years ago.
Progress happens, but there is much loss, too.
6
To answer the question in the headline of this story asks in a word …"Yes!" I have archived emails from family and friends over many years in the same way I have saved every handwritten note and letter of sentimental value. Recent (by that I mean the past four years), daily emails between between one close friend and myself have become a form of journaling our lives as we share the important and the mundane. I've been waiting for a story such as this for years. I shudder to think what our understanding of history and just plain ol' life would be without the collections of those that have gone before us!
1
My daughter went to a camp that would print out parent’s emails to their children. I found a bunch of our emails to her while sorting through some papers—it was a little window into daily life, talking about the cat, the new couch, the things we were doing. It was delightful.
1
Last November while looking through a box in my basement that hadn’t been disturbed in 30 years, I came across a cache of 230 letters I had written home while in the Army. 170 were from Vietnam, where I was a medic with a mechanized infantry unit (1/5 Mech, 25th Infantry). My mother had saved them and my father gave them to me when she died in 1982. I had ignored them.
Now I confronted the person I was 50 years ago - a scared 20-year-old in a strange land. I discovered that I was a pretty good writer with readable penmanship (they are in cursive). I discovered that I quickly learned to casually accept death among my fellow soldiers, and perhaps even the inevitability of my own death. I learned that I was selective in making close friends, for fear of that person being torn away from me in a flash. I was reminded not only of the carnage of war and the senseless death of impossibly young soldiers, but the daily loss of life and equipment to an invisible enemy. Antitank mines and booby traps killed far more than AK-47s.
I went from being scared medic to eventually becoming Professor of Emergency Medicine at Temple University. The half-century old reckoning has more or less forced me to examine the trajectory of my life; I am writing a book about then and now.
It concerns me deeply that in 40 or 50 years, no one will find a cache of letters that they wrote home from a war zone or a “grand tour” adventure revealing the beginnings of their adult life. And that’s a shame.
22
Having lived overseas for almost 20 years and traveled constantly for my work, I found myself regretting my inability to archive e-mails to family members, friends and close colleagues written in the early pre-cloud, pre gmail days. E-mails have taken the place of letters home and to people important in our lives who live far away. The old Outlook Express made it possible to save e- mails and to work offline, frequently essential in locations with limited WiFi access, and this created an archive.
Not sure yet how best to organize and preserve this history, but I know it captures an important part of my life. While I’ve kept many letters and a few physical objects, these messages are just as valuable.
1
Around the time my three siblings and I had all fledged for college or elsewhere—September 1986, to be precise—my parents initiated a weekly family news letter. It was typed, but printed on paper and copies mailed to each of us. Three decades and about 1700 letters later, they would mail the last one, as my father's failing health made it difficult for them to continue writing them. Remarkably, my mother saved a copy of nearly every one, chronologically positioned in a series of three-ring binders she kept on their shelf at home.
Although mundane to anybody else, it is an astonishingly complete collection and account, so I took it upon myself to archive them. The USPS lost them while they were en route to me, but, after I wrote the US Postmaster General, they miraculously somehow found them all. The digital version, a massive PDF document of the scanned letters, is not much fun to flip through, but at least it is partially searchable.
After my father died several months ago, my siblings and I gave my mother the complete four-volume, over-sewn, hardbound set, re-printed from the PDF on 2363 pages of acid-free, archival paper. In the short time since receiving it, she has already read it in its entirety and plans to do it again, as it helps her cope with the loss of her husband of 56 years and co-author of 30.
32
@Keith. What a beautiful story!
2
I've saved every Yankee ticket stub from the games I've been to going back to about 2013, and I wish I had saved the ones from earlier as well, but it's only as I grow older that I get more nostalgic about these things. I would be very disappointed if the Yankees discontinued physical tickets; I could stave printed out bar codes from those ridiculous electronic tickets, but that doesn't bring up the same feelings as the actual ticket in the box on my bedside table.
I understand saving emails as opposed to physical letters, that makes sense to me. But the people saying "Oh, just save a digital receipt" I think are missing something about why people save these sorts of things.
1
I secretly saved all emails and instant messages with my daughter while in college. I had them bound in a lovely book which I presented to her the night before her graduation.
5
About seven years ago, I got ahold of my great grandfather's scrapbook. His lifespan was 1862-1945. The scrapbook was full of newspaper clippings, photos, letters and memorabilia. [He was from St. Louis, Missouri and a leader in the civic and commercial life of the city.] From these I assembled a new scrapbook, adding many other items from his life that other family members had, ultimately containing about 120 items altogether. I then researched and did annotations for each item, explaining the history behind each of them as best I could, identifying people in photos, speculating on most likely explanations when it wasn't clear, and organizing it all chronologically. I have the hard copy. Many other family members now alive have had a look. I think it is time to digitalize the scrapbook as well, to make its preservation that much more possible for anyone interested in it in the future.
1
When a dear friend passed away suddenly, I went into my emails, collected the ones we had exchanged over the three years I had been using gmail, and created a chronological dialog document. The only editing was removing a lot of reply all emails from others that included us. I found an appropriate photo, and also dicovered in the NY Times an article and picture of a triple rainbow in Maine that occurred on the day of his death. His brother had mentioned at the funeral that he loved rainbows and had seen one on the day of his brother's passing. Thus, I had the concluding picture and text for a printed document which I sent to the widow.
Without the emails, this would not have been possible.
1
A wonderful academic scholarly archive that I used lost its funding. Poof. Resource gone. Once you experience this your habits change. But it raises another question. I process massive amounts of information and deciding what to keep and how to keep it has become a challenge. Love digital but the "paperless office" has simply doubled my workload.
1
We have a few letters written by my wife's grandmother, a former English teacher. Beyond a link to the past, they are works of art in themselves, written in a beautiful penmanship rarely seen today.
Perhaps thoughts were measured more carefully when it took longer to write.
11
As a kid I collected stuff, mainly out of a sense of obligation to the form. As an adult, I don't want anything I don't need. My kids are young, and I deeply get this stage of life is precious and fleeting. But when it's gone, it's gone, and being attached to what's not here probably won't help me much.
I don't save things because I am keenly aware that I'm going to die, and when it's time, I want to go peacefully in the moment. Macabre, but honest.
6
A few months ago I came upon two id's with our photographs we had taken during our visit to Turkey over 45 years ago. My future husband and I were long-haired college students with hardly any money but a suitable tent and backpacks ready to take on the world. I framed the id's and put them on display in our living room nearby where we charge our phones every evening. Every day when I quickly glance at the photos I am reminded that no matter what has ensued since those pictures were taken...fights, betrayals, separations, illness and all the usual battles of married life...the young man who was by my side then is still the person I want by my side now. Above all I am reminded that life flies by in an instant and having a daily reminder to fix a place and time when I had thought that love could conquer all is a balsam to my soul and makes me appreciate all that we went through together.
27
Yes, I collect old emails, and it's much easier than saving old letters. Some years ago, I resolved to save all emails to and from relatives and close friends. Now my collection goes back to 2004, and I wish I still had the earlier ones.
3
Make printed photo books. I collect the most significant photos, those that illustrate best what my family has been doing, and have them printed in photo books _with metadata_ — who is in the photos, what we were doing, where we were. I’ve been doing one for every year, plus extra for trips and weddings. I’ve used Mixbook several times, but if I don’t have the time to put together the book, I sometimes have My Social Book just scavenge all my Facebook photo albums for that year and print them with their captions. Also, if you do use Facebook, download all your data (which includes all your posts and photos) every year. For one thing, it’s easier to search than your online posts.
When my mom died I inherited boxes and boxes of photos. Most have no information with them. I have no idea who they are, where they were taken, or why Mom saved them. This memorabilia is only valuable to the next generation if it’s labeled and explained. Who has time to do that anymore??
7
I'm still working on cleaning out my late husband's collections (and he died 21 years ago). I have boxes of Playbills and old letters. I also archive old emails; I have had some pen pals for many years.
The older emails have had far more importance to me. They became my means of correspondence and I was able to archive the sent as well as the received. My emails with pen pals became a de facto journal of my life (and include photos and other attachments). And they are SEARCHABLE. If I want to relive something, I can look it up.
But letters I wrote and sent are nearly always gone to me. (I did find the letters I wrote my late husband but I found no comfort and little interest in reading them; that part of my life ended many years ago.) I don't want to spend my remaining days searching through dusty boxes of old memories.
I choose my keepsakes far more carefully, now. Why would I want to burden my son and daughter with caretaking or otherwise dealing with my physical detritus after I'm gone? They have as little interest in those as they do in silverplate or china hutches or VHS collections. They are young adults who want (sometimes, need) to be able to move to new locations without having to consider a lot of physical baggage.
For those who find great comfort in their collections, that's nice -- but I can't say that I have regrets about that mindset changing.
94
@JH Young adults don't much care about family histories and family keepsakes - until it's too late.
13
@S North I cared about family keepsakes...and then had to clean out two deceased parents' homes. I am much more selective now and am actively trying to select the best of what I previously kept and ditch the rest, because I know the process of sorting a household of stuff after a parent has died is excruciating and not what I want to pass on.
20
@JH True but recall that petters can photocopied before sending or just snapshot them on your smart phone if you think they’re worthwhile.
1
Yes, I collect old emails. I keep folders on my computer, "family," "friends," etc., and I pull the emails over and keep them. I used to think that it would be important for when my mother died, to have her voice, her remarks about day to day events, still accessible. She died last year and I was correct. When I can bear to read them, I'm happy that I saved her every missive.
I also scanned thousands of family photos (shout out to the Wirecutter for pointing me towards the best scanner) and archived them digitally. I'm single, and when I wonder what will happen to these photos someday, if they'll be tossed with my hard drive, I remind myself it doesn't matter. What matters is that they're accessible to ME.
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@DannyR,
Memories are highly personal, so it is significant that YOU decided that your saved memories, in whatever format, were meant to suit YOU.
I also recently went through over 6,000 photographs, which spanned 160 years. I gave away 400 photos to other people or museums and I saved just 38 for myself. which is what suited me.
11
@DannyR - I've actually started saving all the voicemails that my mother leaves on my phone.
It's true, the collecting "We" don't save the same kinds of memories that people saved fifty years ago, but what we save can still be meaningful.
12
@Jen I can’t tell you how comforted I was to find some of my mother’s voicemail messages after she died. What a gift to be able to hear her voice now, even though she’s no longer with us. You will be so glad to have those recordings someday.
22
I've often thought about this. I have a huge collection of Playbills and concert and opera programs dating to my first time in a theater in 1974. Baseball ticket stubs and programs from over 45 years ago as well. I frequently look at them and a flood of memories comes back as I relive the wonderful times in my life. Same with vacation souvenirs, brochures, pictures, etc., from decades of vacations dating back to family trip when I was 10. They are such a part of my life and are cherished inanimate friends. Life would be so much duller and dimmer without them to look at and hold. The world is definitely missing something now that everything is electronic.
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@Andy
It's wonderful that they are meaningful to you. The bigger question is will they be meaningful to anyone after you? I suppose if you enjoy them, that is enough. The even bigger question is how much, if at all, do we want to burden future generations with our memories? That might very well be the question for the ages. I am starting to consider it, i.e., do I want to burden my children with what meant so much to me? I hope to impart to them our shared history and that the history will mean something to them. On the other hand, how much do I consider my past now that I am 64? Again, a question for the ages.......
5
@Andy I am a college theatre professor, so I had MANY playbills and theatre ephemera. Then we downsized last year and some simply had to go. My triage was this: I made an Excel database with the relevant data for every theatregoing experience I could reconstruct -- in the thousands. That way I have a chronology of my playgoing back to the 70s. I gave way programs to the university library that were of historical significance. And I kept exactly and only the programs of productions that had made a deep and lasting impression on me. That amounted to one box, for which space has been found even in smaller quarters.
14
@Andy
Old paper goods can be fire hazards. Be sure to have plenty of fire alarms and fire extinguishers.
I'm a graduate student in archives management and am writing about how this problem has broad implications for the future of our cultural memory. Not only do we have fewer physical records to save, but most people don't have great digital storage habits. Archivists worry about a so-called "digital black hole" that won't be fully understood until it's too late to do much about; the result of this will be generations worth of human history that is underrepresented in the archives. There will be plenty of content, but the sorts of personal collections that hold lasting value will become more rare.
This has been discussed for nearly as long as personal computing has been mainstream, and there's no clear cut solution. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I hope to see more collaboration between archivists and potential donors. Perhaps we can find new ways to preserve our memories—not just for ourselves, but for all of us. Nobody *has* to share anything, but it's nice to have the option.
196
@Jen As a cultural historian, I am especially fond of ephemera that reflects the time and place of whomever I happen to be studying--postcards, letters, matchbooks, receipts, ticket stubs, photographs, scrapbooks, etc. Each object tells a story, enabling the researcher to imagine the context in which that object was manufactured, used, and even preserved. My dissertation topic was partially inspired by a carefully curated scrapbook of scenes from Mexico City assembled by an American journalist in the 1940s and later donated to an archive by his family after his death. Will digital ephemera have the same effect? The Internet Archive is one attempt at preserving our public digital past. How future generations, especially future historians, will imagine our private selves without digital ephemera remains to be seen.
22
@Toni - It's a question we should all be asking ourselves, though I try not to fear the worst. We will lose some things and gain others. It pains me to think how much has gone digital, but in a world that struggles to sustain a growing human population, I also wonder whether it's such a bad thing for fewer items to survive. Because it's still going to be more than what came before it. We will all continue to collect the physical items that meant something to us. It's not going away completely, but it is sad, and it does make me uneasy (despite my rationalization a few sentences ago!)
7
@Jen As an academic in literature, I think this will have serious long-term implications for the field I am in. I recently completed recovery and reconstruction of a work believed lost by a major modernist writer. It involved going through multiple drafts of the manuscript versions he kept writing and dismantling and then re-constructing, his correspondence and letters with close friends, and cryptic notes he wrote to himself. Granted my author was a bit of a hoarder, but I wonder, for example, how many rough drafts that help us know more about a particular writer's process or the correspondences between writers and their editors that illuminate those relationships will simply be lost to us.
15
When my boyfriend died on 9/11, although my computer was destroyed and our work servers only captured portions of emails, I went back and saved them all. I transferred them to a word document and then printed them. When I left my job, I did the same with emails from my now husband from when we were first dating— sweet, thoughtful, funny communications between us, setting plans for dinner with friends or a date. I did the same when my brother died unexpectedly a few years ago. I have these mini “books” of correspondence, love letters and read them occasionally. It always leaves me with a memory I’d forgotten and smile on my face feeling closer even though some of them have left this world.
296
" .. This season the Cubs have joined more than a dozen other Major League teams in eliminating paper tickets in favor of digital versions, downloaded to apps and displayed on phones .."
One option: use a second smart-phone to take a JPG of the digital ticket, perhaps above that day's hard-copy newspaper. Like taking notes by hand, then taking a JPG of them and uploading them to cloud storage.
G'ma collected historic newspapers. A few, OK. Huge piles -- fire hazard, as they dry out, not good and costly.
3
@KFC I too keep volumes of email correspondence, and while the content is equally moving to me, the form is not. Letters are immediately recognizable as a personal token; printouts of emails might as well be printouts of magazine articles or bank letters. I've started writing letters and postcards again myself.
17
@KFC I transferred some loving text exchanges to computer and printed them, yes;!although I could just print them off the phone.
3
Computers are a wonderful way to save memories. I have over 100,000 emails stored on my hard drive. They’re my unofficial diary. Using search I can relive past events, whether they’re tragedies or triumphs. I can quickly find the date my mother had surgery and the concerns my brother and I shared via email. I love the casual nature of emails between friends and families. Minor, insignificant moments are captured, like the time the water heater broke. A moment too uneventful for be written on paper but a memory that brings a smile today. And photos! Now I can save them all. Before I’d throw away tons. After all there’s only so much room in a photo album. Sometimes photos that meant nothing when I took them take on new meaning years later. A relative who died too young in a picture I would have tossed because I looked fat and besides, there would be many more opportunities for pictures. Or so I thought. Digital memories are poignant and practical. They means as much to me as my boxes full of letters and my frayed photo albums. I’m lucky to have them both.
3
@Misocainea Yes! One can choose to hold on to memories in a variety of ways. One is not better than the other. They are just different. Same with those of us that love books. . I prefer to read a "real" book does it bother me that others read online ? Yes it does. I think that aren't having the full experience - the turning of the page, the smell of the book . . the whatever . .
Digital memories are poignant and practical. Amen.
3
I’m of the in-between generation. I learned to write with a (cartridge) fountain pen, and I still use such a pen. I was a serious photographer. I love books.
But for all of that, I also am aware of the ephemeral nature of so much that we collect. The telephone had already supplanted much, perhaps most written communication when I was a child; and the massive production of snapshots in the ‘60s and ‘70s undercut the value of the individual photographic image.
The digital era permits us to see communication for what it truly is—communication, not something to be hoarded and coddled. I recall photographers of the ‘70s arguing against using RC paper because the photos printed on it would not be of archival quality. I miss my typewriter, my Rollei 35, and trips to numerous great local bookstores (fortunately I do still have access to one of those). I have to make due with my laptop, costless photos taken with a phone or digital camera, and my Kindle.
But the only people who would be interested in the letters my then-future-spouse and I exchanged in the summer of 1984 would be those mourning the death of paper letters, and missing the fact that they were primarily *communications* at the start of an enduring relationship. Typed on a CP/M computer, printed by dot matrix, and signed with a fountain pen.
1
It is very easy to archive emails in an organized way that is fact easier than saving letters. The same applies to emailed boarding passes and hotel reservations. And digital photos can of course be preserved and categorized. As more and more becomes solely digital it will be similarly preserved if one wishes without the need for boxes of paper. I'm not sure there is a clearcut downside though change certainly carries both gains and losses. The art of the illuminated manuscript is little practiced today, if at all. The printing press simply proved far more effective in a practical sense.
3
When my mother passed we inherited a scrapbook she'd curated through her college days in the 1940s. She'd methodically kept dance tickets, photos and letters sent and received from gentlemen callers in hot pursuit; prior to my dad's arrival on the scene (or above; he was a test pilot and often flew over her dorm).
We saw how she elegantly and respectfully delivered the bad news to the young men who were suddenly out of the picture. It's a marvelous record that will be passed on and a testament to just how classy she was.
Inheriting a Gmail account with 150,000 messages is a very different thing. With no curation, finding that 'diamond email in the rough' is a task so daunting that many inheritors will likely give up before they start; and they will miss out because the curation is missing. I like to think that some day, after I'm long gone, a grandchild will want to know more about grandpa and how he navigated the challenging times of the early 2000s, or how he pursued grandma.
The trick is, how do we curate our digital footprint now so it has meaning and is not overwhelmed by amazon order acknowledgements and daily weather blurbs and special offers?
2
I have about 12 years of e-mails from a group of friends with whom I worked some time ago. They include some valuable (to us) history of our times and projects together and I was going to compile them into a book, whether on-line or physical. Unfortunately, as I result, there are 20,000 items in my inbox. I'm about one page into the book. Gee, I wonder how this will end...
2
@CP not well
At age 77, my wife and I are "cutting back," which includes eliminating the clutter in the condo in which we now live. Along the way, I've accumulated, perhaps, thousands of slides and, from a ten year period, a hoard of 8mm film. Trips, games, Experiences in our lives and those of our kids abound in an unexplored box currently taking up space. Finding a high quality digitizer has proven to be difficult given our resources, and paying to have it done even more unpalatable.
The thought of simply throwing this archive away, simply appalls me. Recently, a professor at Harvard called me to ask about a box containing ten reels of 16mm film of a trip up the Nile River taken by members of my family during the winter of 1929 - 30. Since then, these have been digitized, cleaned, and smoothed by the university, and stored in an archive there...forever. But this only occurred because a distinguished professor at a great university was writing a biography of the tour guide.
What will happen to the memory of the trips we took, the times we had, the lives we led? Who knows, but it strikes me as the real "end of history" that's being forecast by some. It truly makes me sad......
5
Those who claim that emails and digitized images are easy to access and safely stored forget that both require electricity. Physical objects are not only tangible -- touch is one of our senses, why cut it out of your life? -- but also don't require electricity to experience. Physical objects are therefore free of an experiential condition that digital artifacts are subject to, inherently. It amazes me that so many have such faith in the constancy of the electric grid not just locally, but wherever they go, when time and again, experience demonstrates the risk in doing so.
6
I often wonder what will gather dust in attics of the future without books, records, letters, and photo albums.
But there is some upside here. I live in New York City and with the rise of online food ordering, I welcome the decline in takeout menus strewn in our building lobby. Traveling with digital boarding passes is easier. And sharing digital tickets for sporting events is a great tool when people in your group arrive at different times.
I also keep a well organized digital photo library on a computer and appreciate that with a few clicks I can pull up every image of a specific friend or family member, with dates and locations. This is progress.
With that said, I still force myself to write letters once in a while. I will still keep every Playbill even if I have to print a digital one myself. And each December, I still send printed holiday cards to every friend I know. In addition to creating a physical keepsake, it’s the only way to keep track of where everyone lives anymore!
2
I have been cleaning out for months. Such a treasure trove of family history mixed with total junk. Musty and dusty.
My most recent task was my own couple of boxes of keepsakes, not updated for over 10 years. Most of what I have accumulated in the interim is digital. Unavailable to anybody but me and neglected.
As for my trove: Old letters, cards, diaries, photographs and random odds and ends from my childhood. All but forgotten, it was amazing how I remembered almost every single thing once I saw it. Such an immediate link to myself of old to hold these tangible items in my hand. Revealing to see the simple items I treasured as a small child - some fancy paper, a small piece of sewing, old schoolwork.
My now deceased uncle was a veteran - he did one tour in Vietnam and two in Korea - re-reading his letters sent before my own trip to Vietnam warning me about the perils of communism and recent typhoons, lists of wind speeds, temperatures and rainfall for various parts of the country - communicated his terror that I would go where he would not dream of returning.
Around 10 years ago, my childhood friends stopped writing letters but before that I had years of handmade cards and handwritten letters. I appreciate the shared history, and allayed any doubt about the strength of these relationships. The quick texts and infrequent interactions that our grown up lives permit are not as sustaining as those long idle hours.
I will pick up my pen again. I will put down my phone.
13
My family bonds over re-reading old letters, birthday cards, poring over old photographs, even school year-books. And yet, none of us today corresponds using mail or even e-mail. Now it is all WhatsApp.
In relation to storing our memorabilia digitally, I worry that if one dies suddenly, the relatives will not be able to get into e-mail and the cloud and one's laptop. One's e-mail and cloud data will remain forever and forever, orphaned and a zombie. I am seriously planning to write a "will" containing all the essential passwords to leave to my next-of-kin.
4
@Priya S that is called having a digital will where you leave instructions on how to dispose of your digital life. It can be written into any legal instrument tat you put in place for your other material goods.
Yes. I have most of my important emails going back over decades now. It's very useful to keep them for reference. (For example, I had to fill out a list of places I'd been in the last 10 years, and it was invaluable to have my emails.)
In junior high school Spanish class, we were given applications from the International Youth Service to find pen-pals abroad. For 75 cents, you provided just 5 attributes of the person you wanted to write to: age, sex, language, hobbies (selected from a multiple choice list), and country. Weeks later, an information packet with names and addresses would appear.
What amazed me most was being overwhelmed by the sense of familiarity when visiting these friends years later: their towns appeared exactly as I had imagined, the families and friends all seemed so familiar -- you kinda just fit right in... Letters didn't come and go nearly as often as emails do these days, but friendships grew deep and rich.
There is an intimacy that you get from exchanging physical letters and photos, as well as an appreciation of and respect for our differences. Social media seems opposite: less intimate, more "sameness" if that makes sense.
With letters, you don't need to see large counts of views and likes to feel special; you already are special to just one person -- and isn't that what matters?
14
My 30-year old daughter still thrills when she receives a letter from me, written on Nancy Drew stationary. I started this “habit” when she was a freshman in college and moved 3000 miles away from me to USC in CA. As she received a scholarship, there was no way, she could not go.
But those Nancy Drew letters, phone calls and occasional visits, where we would drive up the CA coast ( like Thelma and Louise) still remain as both of our dearest memories. I sent her a Nancy Drew letter just last week. She has kept them all.
4
Those paper reminders - my U2 concert tickets, various ticket stubs May be less common, but in its place, instantaneous photos and videos, that record both personal moments and potential start historical movements...surely on balance has greater merits. May we move forward with enlightenment. My new worry, making machines and giving it such artificial intelligence that it becomes smarter or more aware than a human.
1
On the subject of eliminating paper tickets, the airlines’ eradication of them really upsets me. I mean, sure, you can chose to print off your boarding pass at home, but that isn’t the same as having that actual card ticket, is it?
2
@Andrew Strauss no it is not the same, it is better. Better yet, if you have a smartphone you can have your boarding pass sent to that.
What possible reason could you have for wanting a boarding pass????
I save emails and text chains, I archive emails, takes so little space compared to keeping paper. I’d love to scan every memory I’ve saved currently sitting in many boxes in the attic and then toss, but what a chore! Kids don’t need ticket stubs anymore-they document their lives in photos, all dated and located automatically, they will easily access their memories. But it is important to back up and save copies-my entire attic could fit in a safe deposit box, love the modern age!
3
I was thrilled to find letters written by my both my mother & father from Saudi Arabia back in the 50s that my grandmother had kept. What a real adventure that was I
am the last of the family & not sure if our children or grandkids will really care. All the letters allowed me a glimpse of me as a child. What a gift for me.
Let's see if they will have the same feelings about my writings that I might leave.
My father wrote about that journey & more in pieces for the retirement magazine, wrote & made Toastmasters speeches & loved sending emails. I managed to save those off his machine after he passed.
Memories.
4
I do WAY WAY more sharing with family of current events and happenings in my life using my phone camera and texts than I ever did with a film camera where I sent away for negatives and prints. Photos are automatically uploaded to my Google drive which can be accessed by shared link. Dusty shoeboxes of memorabilia are seldom removed from the back of the closet. Scan that stuff, create a photo book or calendar, or puzzle, and ENJOY it NOW.
3
@As-I-Seeit Sure....but who else will ever benefit after you are gone? Shared a generation or two later this memorabilia is such an education for the lucky person to find it. Not only that, digital memorabilia just sits at a giant server farm somewhere sucking up electricity and causing climate change.
When memorabilia of my great-great grandparents, great-grandparents and grandparents on my father's side were found some years ago it changed my family, healed old wounds, enlightened us to who we were as a group, why events and trajectories of people's lives had taken occurred the way they had. It was amazing. We realized old damage from the Great Depression that we carried with us and moved on. We understood ourselves a bit better and were inspired by an interesting past. That information was more instructive than DNA tests. There were letters full of stories, personalities, photographs, griefs, losses and achievements, great journeys, newspaper clippings. I don't know quite how I would have found out about the ship's captains, musicians, artists, educators, orphaned immigrants, athletes, soldiers and battles without them. The Great Depression had erased so much and the several boxes gave back.
Where I live in Alaska climate change is damaging beyond what we could have imagined a few years ago...our boxes of photographs, newspaper clippings, diaries, letters, vessel logs, fish tickets, weather records and letters will measure the change and enlighten whoever finds them.
One of the nicest moments I have with my 88 year old mother, is when visiting her we go through boxes of her stored letters going back 70-80 years. We sit shoulder to shoulder in her living room on the couch, or lay side by side in her bed, and read them out loud to laughter, smiles, and at times, tears. Not only am I interested in the letters themselves, but I’m also appreciative of being with my mother over a few sheets of stationery, some stamps, a faded postmark, and a moment in time that she can share with me from long, long ago.
53
My late mother, too, kept (paper) programs of my school concerts, piano recitals, special awards and certificates.
At the time of her passing, I happily recycled them with Marie Kondo in mind, but couldn't help but shed a tear for the physical connection to the past.
5
I'm the oldest of four siblings. When Mom and Dad moved to "Assisted Living" three years ago, their living space went from 1,600 square feet to less than half of that.
So entire closets full of Dad's 7,000 photographic slides and Mom's forty photo albums (each photo lovingly secured with those little, black "corners" that one licked like old postage stamps to hold printed photos onto each album page) are now either in my basement or out in a storage locker (that I pay $62 per month to rent).
Mom now has severe dementia. But as I cleaned out her walk-in closet, I discovered thirty years worth of journals she meticulously kept in about the same number of 8" x 11" spiral notebooks. That's probably two thousand pages in total of her most intimate thoughts and musings. And no one (myself included) has read even 1% of these words.
None of my siblings have any interest in retaining any of these photos, journals, scrapbooks and assorted souvenirs from over half a century of my parent's lives. And I don't know when, if ever, I'll find the time in my remaining years to discover and savor even a tiny sip of this vast reservoir of archives of two lives so well-lived.
I'm single with no children. When I pass, I have no doubt that the storage company will toss all those photos, journals and other artifacts straight into a dumpster.
A hundred years from now, a future Ken Burns will never know what he's missed. And I'm just one of tens of millions whose "archives" will be lost forever.
51
@Dave
Would reading the journals aloud to your mother be of any point?
I understand that her being at the point of assisted living, that it may be too late. I often struggle to converse with a family member with dementia and would love to have such rich resources to hand so that I could connect him to his past & have ample relevant communication materials.
Good luck with things.
8
@Dave very powerful and moving words.
2
@Dave Put these documents in your will, give them to your local history society or museum. They are valuable to more people than just the family itseslf.
11
My 89-year-old father passed away in August of 2018. He was a Korean War Veteran and wrote home to his parents and younger sister nearly every day. He also wrote home to my mother. They would marry after he returned home from the war. I gave my siblings, his long-time girlfriend (my mother died in 1967 at 36) and my nieces and nephews copies of every letter that he wrote home to his parents for Christmas four months after he died. The process of copying them, putting them in chronological order, reading them and presenting them in a binder helped me grieve and also brought him back to life, if only for awhile. It helped me know him as a young man in his early 20's. I'm so very grateful that I have those letters. I still have a part of him. His penmanship was beautiful, as were his words. The postmarks, for the most part, let me know where he was when he was writing. What a man he was!
33
@rukiddingme
Penmanship -- another lost art and as personal an image as a photograph.
Thanks for sharing your lovely remembrance.
3
Future biographers will be stymied by the paucity of correspondence and lack of written records.
We should all print out all text messages and emails to save for posterity. Perhaps to save space we can save them online, but everyone should do this and not only politicians and celebrities.
4
@Kathryn Boussemart I am currently trying to delete and destroy anything I have ever written in case I want to run for office later down the road.
1
Along the same lines, I was thinking that I am from an older generation that writes somewhat long emails.
The young kids these days, they prefer short messages via SMS, WhatsApp, or FB Messenger.
6
I have email that dates back 20 years. This includes email from my grandmother who passed away in 2009. Emails about my grandfather that passed away in 2001 (he didn't personally email anyone).
I was just going through them and found a few photos of cats I haven't seen the faces of in over a decade. I wish the emails had photos of the people in those emails. That would have made this extra nice.
Thank you for inspiring this trip down memory lane.
I have frequently pointed out to my Millennial daughter that the memorabilia I have going back generations in our dusty attic will outlast anything she has saved digitally. When my husband and I downsized last year we went through that attic and found that I had saved every school paper, news clipping, writings and handwritten notes of, about and by our daughter. We culled, of course, but I kept a lot. There were also family papers, letters and photos stretching back over nearly two centuries. I repacked them in acid free containers and hope our daughter will continue to preserve them for future generations. I want to create a website in memory of my mother, but I fear it will not last for generations like the boxes of precious hard copies. There is nothing like holding something in my hand that someone who lived a hundred years ago also held and touched, or wore, or wrote or quilted -- nothing.
13
"I want to create a website in memory of my mother, but I fear it will not last for generations like the boxes of precious hard copies."
You can save a digital copy of the web site to a DVD or a hard drive. If you are really concerned, you can also print hard copies of each web page using archival ink and paper.
BTW, there are 500 year old Gutenberg bibles that are in perfect condition. In part that is because Gutenberg invented his own ink. The British Library has several web pages on Gutenberg's technology:
Gutenberg Bible: Making the Bible
bl dot uk/treasures/gutenberg/makingbible.html
When I was at college in Boston, I would visit Fenway Park to see the Red Sox play as often as I could. I recently came upon 2 ticket stubs from an August, 1975 game (the year of the famous Carlton Fisk Series HR) that for some reason I had saved all these years in a box of memorabilia. Knowing my nephew was a rabid 10-year-old Red Sox fan, I mailed those stubs to him, along with an old Fenway Franks stuffed animal guy, and added a note to describe what going to a ballgame was like that long ago. I think he was thrilled, but I was too, to think I could brighten a young boy's day and connect with him on a common passion at the same time with timeless, simple reminders of life that could just as easily been thrown out. How sad that would have been in retrospect.
11
Think of the challenges for biographers in the future, trying to see inside a life without the benefit of personal correspondence on paper. Rereading Shelby Foote's Civil War recently, I noticed a scene in which an aide comes upon Grant in a private moment in his tent. The General is organizing his correspondence with his wife, bundling packets of letters with ribbon. There was a man who lived an "examined life."
9
This is a very nice thought about recollection. My way of recollecting this article is by no mean a paper trace, but a bookmark in my NYT reader profile, nobody except me will see it. And the second one is in my Flipboard magazine that might live longer than me, as long my profile is not deactivated after my death. In short, no paper traces, but so much server farms space to cool down, to store our Instagram Twitter YouTube Facebook digital memories; digital memories are our big carbon footprint. My keepsake boxes don’t consume any!
1
I still have letters from my undergrad days, it to mention papers I wrote in undergrad and grad school. I have a paper mache gift my son made for me when he was 5 years old, over 23 years ago. I will keep it until I am no longer here. What is most poignant to me about these things are all the memories they trigger. To feel something tangible from our pasts, triggers a smell, a sound, a taste, a visual clue, all the senses that together continuously keep unwrapping more clues and pieces of a forgotten puzzle. All act and do their part until a memory is full bodied, warm and once again a living thing.
7
"Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?"
I do, actually. But only those from my 77 year old mother. The e-mails I have date back to 2009 when she was still working as a nurse. She was (and still is) a tech novice, but I love reading her e-mails with ALL CAPS and sentences that have no space after the period, like this.Despite the medium, there were many words of humor, happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, and - most importantly - love, that I sometimes go back and read. If she passes before I do, those e-mails will be some of the more precious pieces of memorabilia that I will try to hold on to.
4
My mother's family has saved letters, diaries, essays, even doctors' bills since the middle of the 19th Century. I just finished writing a narrative piece about how various branches of the family fared during the Civil War, quoting letters and other documents. Two brothers were killed in the Confederate Army while a great-great grandfather lost his leg while fighting for the Union. Two sisters followed followed their husbands to settle in Iowa, far from their birth family. A wife (my great-great grandmother) living in a small town in Missouri is terrified as the town falls back and forth between the Yankees and the Rebels and she has to keep her family safe. Meanwhile, her husband is in Iowa City looking for work and hoping "Old Abe don't get me".
The closeness I feel for these people as I touch the paper and read their handwriting is both heartwarming and heart wrenching.
People say I should scan and digitalize all these documents but who would hold them, read them, care about them then?
We will scan them to give more people access to them, but there's nothing like the real thing.
39
I once dug out a shoebox of correspondence, and various bric-a-brac from my high school and college days. The unadulterated banality of information conveyed was mind-numbing. Not even a mildly entertaining diversion. I promptly recycled the lot.
It's sensationally difficult to get memoirs published, or to curate a successful museum of artifacts. Both require distinguished writing or remarkable objects that can tell a compelling story.
The detritus of the anonymous common woman or man, whether real or digital, fall far short. They are rightfully and relievedly soon forgotten.
8
"The detritus of the anonymous common woman or man, whether real or digital, fall far short."
Actually, "detritus" is what archaeologists rely on to help understand the past.
A striking example is the 6th century Artognou stone, which was found at the site of Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, England. The stone has writing on it that is thought to have been carved for practice, because the stone was found as part of a drain.
For more, see the "Secrets of the Dead" episode, "King Arthur's Lost Kingdom".
3
Mr Funt's analog romanticism is fine, but digital storage of electronic letters, scanned stuff, and digital photos is a godsend!
Google just celebrated GMail's 15th Birthday. When Google offered users gigabytes of free storage, I dumped Microsoft Hotmail in favor of GMail. Google continuouly expanded your storage. Unless deleted, all e-mails sent or received since 2004 are still stored -- on two Google servers and tape backup -- and are searchable and easily retrieved.
Shortly after Google acquired Picasa photo editing software, my first son was born. I was able to store the original photos or cropped versions to Picasaweb, which later morphed into photos.google.com, organize them into albums and share them with family and friends around the world at no cost. Beyond generous free storage, Google offered me an additional 20 GB for $5 a year "forever", a pledge they've kept.
In 2013 Yahoo offered new Flickr users one terabyte of free storage forever! Before Flickr was acquired by Smugmug, I had uploaded thousands of photos and videos, curating the best photos into virutal albums shared with far-flung F&F. I have urged Smugmug's owners to honor Flickr's pledge. Smartphones now automatically upload photos to the cloud. My sons delight in perusing our digital albums; recent prints of old photos decorate our home. One can make succession arrangements so digital archives go to heirs and you and those you authorize can download to other storage media or print at anytime.
1
@Carioca - the advent of expanded digital storage is a wonder - I've been in the image archiving business since microfilm was how it was done - but do remember to print copies of some of your family favorites from time to time, and store them somewhere that doesn't suffer too much from light and temperature change and humidity. Digital storage is no more permanent than physical, and can be less so if you consider the vagaries of changing media types, file formats and hosting providers.
Digital formats are fragile just as physical artifacts are. When you say "cloud" storage, think how persistent a cloud is. When you save images or movies, wonder how old the format is, and will it continue long.
Companies that promise to store data will do so while it's in their interest - but bankruptcy happens. Free storage has been deleted, lost, abandoned by companies that either didn't spend much ensuring longevity, or shut down. Paid "forever" storage is also a promise that ends when the company decides "forever" has gone long enough.
I'm currently digitizing some 8mm movies my father-in-law made, so they can be shared 50 years after they were taken, including with his 99-year-old sister in law. I'm keeping the film so I can replace data lost in the cloud again if needed. Same with movies and slides my dad and my grandfather took. I'm keeping the projectors, too - one part of the memory is watching on the Big Screen (that rolls up into the stand again, all 6 feet of it).
2
@Carioca I used to have a roommate who worked at a computer store and he got me an external hard drive to store things. It was big for its day - 500Gig and not expensive at all. I am nowhere near even 25% full. I don't see any reason to get corporations involved to store things when digital storage is as cheap as Tupperware.
@tom harrison
I guess you never had a external hard drive die and be told by expert services that the data is irretrievable. Mechanical (spinning) drives are not reliable. Having all your eggs in that fragile 500 GB basket -- unless the stuff you really care about is duplicated offsite -- is foolhardy. Your drive can be lost, stolen, or destroyed by fire or a natural disaster.
SSDs are more reliable. But nothing beats the double or triple redundancy of cloud services like Google, AWS, and others.
There are dozens of YouTube videos that explain why you are better off storing or backing up the most precious content in the cloud.
Postcards, letters, notes, birthday greetings, get well wishes, holiday cards, and yes, now, emails, printed out or in digital folders. What counts is not only the aesthetics of the physical correspondence, but the beauty of the message.
5
When I moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1980, I hired an artist to display my saved Playbills in a fan-shaped pattern on poster board and had it framed. What strikes me most today as it hangs prominently in my house in Arizona are the names - Zero Mostel, Jack Lemon, Nureyev, Mickey Rooney, Ann Miller, Richard Kiley, Yul Brenner, Robert Preston - all gone. No cloud and zip drive could ever replace those memories.
11
This reminds me of the importance of redundancy. Anything very important can be kept in digital form (with a backup) and also on paper.
After all, if we ever have a very strong solar storm like the Carrington Event of 1859, we might lose most of our digital information, so it would be good if there are paper records from which to rebuilt!
3
I wish there were an option to automatically turn all email correspondence with someone into a neat chronological document. My electronic IN boxes would be far more tame.
"My electronic IN boxes would be far more tame."
I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish, but modern email programs and services let you create multiple folders that you can populate by setting up custom filters. Check the documentation.
1
I come from a long line of letter savers -- and I'm enormously grateful. My grandmother and her sisters saved the letters the family wrote one another a century ago; they even saved a letter my great great grandfather wrote to my grandfather a few weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg was fought a few miles from their farm. My mother saved my father's letters to her in their courtship. She saved my letters to her from college and my far flung life afterwards. I saved letters from friends of all sorts for decades. Most of those people are gone now. But when I read those letters again......I'm there and those I held dear are with me, recreating if only for a few moments the love and friendship shown by those letters and photographs. To connect so closely with family in times before I was born is wonderful time travel. The memories are clearer, the love in those letters glows warmly again, and I learn more of myself and my family in rereading and holding and touching those letters. They are a treasure which I feel so very fortunate to have. I believe we are richer to have these links to our past, links which are still there, tangible and accessible, when the electricity fails and devices are obsolete or do not work. To hold that letter and know that the writer also held it and put thoughts on that very piece of paper is to feel a very basic connection. Those bits of paper surviving for decades, even centuries, are true treasures.
14
It's like we are losing entire chunks of our memories and brains, without the tangible objects that connect us to memories. I think it is similar to all the grade school children who are no longer taught to write cursive, and no longer provided with art and music classes in many of the public schools. We used to have books, which are held, and feel like something, smell like something, and transport you in a way not duplicated by reading an article online, or flipping "pages" on a Kindle. Those old ticket stubs from the Cubs game, or your first diploma, or first love note....these have tangible meaning and stimulate the memories we hold in our brains far more indelibly than anything hunted up from the "Cloud".
15
My mother and sister in-law kept everything: every bank statement for 30 years, every ticket stub, program, receipt, paper, letter. Box after box after box.
When they passed away, attics, drawers, closets and boxes were full. There were mice living there and bugs.
My husband and I spent more than a year cleaning out a full apartment and a big house. It was horrible work: wrenching, dirty, upsetting.
Often the objects take on more meaning than the events they represent It becomes an insensitive and callous act to throw anything away. And what happens to the stuff? My father in law, who still has boxes and boxes of memorabilia, suggested we get a storage unit, paying to store all this stuff.
Is this what I leave my children? There are things more important than objects we leave behind.
27
"Is anyone here a digital pack-rat?"
I rarely throw anything digital away, and that includes email. I'm not crazy, I delete all the spam and ads, but I have a continuous email trail going back to 1992.
More than a quarter century of emails, including my entire correspondence with my late wife, (we met online and emailed for over a year even before we ever met in person) who gifted me with love and two beautiful children.
There is value in saving that history. It's different from letters and such because there's no paper trail, but it's the content and passion that are important - not the form.
4
@Gregory E Howard
I'm with you Gregory. I have every email I have sent or received going back to 1991 and even scan (with my camera) every receipt, ticket and letter I've had for years into Evernote. As search tools have gotten better I no longer even bother tagging or categorizing - when I need something a few searches can easily find it. Paper is not inherently better because it is really hard to find anything, especially if the papers aren't yours or aren't well organized!
The author and I must have grown up around the same time, in the same place. We collect the same things.
I love my collections of cards, letters, baseball games, Broadway shows, Met Opera programs.
When I finally fall off the twig, I’m pretty sure my children will toss it all in the landfill.
12
While I have my feet planted firmly in the cloud, I still carry an old fashioned paper notebook nearly everywhere I go so I can record thoughts, doodles, lists, bad poetry, and manifestos (the harmless kind) as I wander through the world.
My written notes often form the basis for digital documents later on, but drafts and outlines are best originated on good paper with a decent pen. My doodles form a portion of my Instagram feed, where my dozen (singular) followers get a glimpse of what I'm thinking that day, including politics, feeble humor, and observations of the absurd.
In other words, I have found a happy medium among the media, and I use them according to mood and manner. I choose not to fret about impermanence of paper or digital disasters - that would assume that my stuff is worthy of collection or further observation. Instead, I dwell in the moment, focus on the process, and enjoy the feedback on those things that I make public.
2
I have a lot of handwritten correspondence: last Christmas cards from people who died , thank you notes, cards just to recall certain signatures (like my dad’s), every card my husband, sons, siblings, and nieces have given me. We also still have every letter my dad wrote home from France in WWII, and the telegram informing my grandparents that he had been “critically wounded” in France.
5
How right you are. And this is not only a personal worry, but also a cultural one.
What will become of archaeology? People in ancient times built towns on the rubble of older settlements and kept on in this way till the towns stood on hills that had once been flat land. Clay tablets and other physical clues to those people's history remain in strata like clues to the history of the planet itself.
Even in Babylon on the Hudson, a bit of digging or rummaging can turn up physical, analog objects that have stories to tell and are able to tell them. The Times sometimes publishes collections of long-lost photographs; pictures that, while lost long, had not been lost forever by becoming technologically inaccessible.
Of course, if we'll soon be setting civilization back to early times through climate change, the archaeological record we already have should contain enough reference material for the amount of reconstruction that will be possible.
3
"Saving" something was part of growing up in the 40's for my family. Wartime meant doing without a lot. First of all, you have to be older, lots older, to remember that the only way you could keep in touch was through writing letters 75 years ago. The phone was not a recourse for kids in the 40's and stamps were really cheap. (Remember 1-cent stamps?) And scrap books and photo albums with black pages and corner stickers were common place. My early habits followed me through adulthood, and although I culled along the way, I still kept the personal letters from my best friends and family--in later years after college, we were scattered around the country and abroad. In my 60's I started to sort--I re-read all of them. I boxed them and mailed (what else) them to my friends. The rereading was fascinating. Over the span of decades, life stories emerged. This involved at least half a dozen contacts. It was/is also tough to throw out the cards, scrap books, old calendars--I haven't gotten to the photos! Since the early 90's I have written most of my letters via e-mail; I still prefer handwriting for truly personal occasions. But, as you might guess, I have trouble "parting" with the email letters. And so I print hard copies, use my 3-hole punch and arrange them in white ring-binders! I suppose that living a long life and cherishing the proof of the good in one's life is why we don't want to rely on the cloud so much.
17
So many works of Joseph Sebastian Bach, meticulously written on paper, disappeared and are gone, forever. I am sure they would still be extant if Bach would have been able to copy them as a digital file.
2
@Tom Mix
Digital files get lost / are unintentionally deleted all the time. A hard-copy backup or two might have been just as effective, if stored in the right places.
I meant Johann Sebastian Bach, of course
Was this one of Bach’s lesser-known children?
I have boxes of memorabilia - pictures, letters, dried pressed flowers, school grades, etc. - from my younger days, as well as from my children's childhood years. I don't believe that either my children or my grandchildren will have any interest whatsoever in this collection, and the boxes will go into the garbage heap when I am gone.
15
@Zara1234 I hope not, Zara! When we're young we don't understand the importance of such historical items. But when they are older they might.
1
Great article !! In going through boxes of letters, I have:
Letters to my mother from her nephews fighting in WW II.
Many Letters to me from my father when I was in college ~60 years ago ( and some from my mom, too!). A relatively few back to them—except when I was abroad.
Letters from my father to me and/or my first husband.
Letters from my father to me and my second husband, and letters from him back to my parents, until my parents came to live with us.
Years of letters from my second husband to 5 kids over about 10 years
And so on!!
It is impossible to convey how amazing these letters are for reminding us all of our shared history!!
11
Since childhood, I kept all correspondence received, until the age of fifty, stored in attractive boxes, and then it was time to make some needed space in my hamster pad.
It was quite a project but some of us live on paper, and in reading a letter from my father, intended for my mother, my long-lost social security card was recovered after missing for thirty years.
After two days, a large pile of forgotten letters from forgotten senders was placed in the middle of a table, along with memories long forgotten; there goes a bit of humanity as it once was, a fleeting thought, and a few words of T.S. Eliot came to mind:
"But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered
There is a time for evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter".
The time when my boss retired, and when asking where he wished to have his speeches on paper stored, he thought they no longer mattered. One day, somebody in your family may want to read these, because they have meaning not only to the Public but your children.
And three months after the decease of my mother, I found a photo of her on E-Bay, one that I had never seen, and with only a few hours to retrieve it, it was sent to her son as a gift in her memory.
Cassandra was asked by her sister on her death to destroy her letters. Jane Austen is her name.
6
I was disappointed to learn over the last couple of years that MLB and NFL no longer issue paper tickets. The teams now assume you have a smart phone, have the specialized ticket app and know how to use it. Moreover like Peter writes the paper is a keepsake to remind me of those special sports moment with family and friends. The world is changing and I’m falling behind I’m afraid.
3
When I was a baby, my mother took two dozen rolls of film as baby pictures. Due to the expense of developing them, she never got them developed. Twenty years later, when she finally did, they were ruined. There was nothing on them. I have few--if no--baby pictures. Recently, my half-brother, a professional photographer in his 70s, found three or four photographs in his archives of my and my brother as toddlers, a couple included my dad. They are the only ones I have of myself at that age.
Similarly, almost all of the photos of my children are digital. They are stored on various old hard drives for which I no longer have connectivity. They are still there, but over time those drives will fail because they are not used. The documents on them will be lost. The pictures, never printed, will disappear.
In a bin, next to me, I have photos from the earliest days of photography. They are pictures and diaries of my grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother. I have the letter, written in his own hand, describing the exploits of my great-great-grandfather which won him the medals during the Civil War. He explains exactly why he was considered a hero when he returned. He was truly humble, no humble-brag.
I am perplexed that such things will not exist for my great-great-grandchildren. They will inherit hard drives, which they will not be able to read. They won't have the cables. They will have nothing to plug them into.
15
"They will inherit hard drives, which they will not be able to read. They won't have the cables. They will have nothing to plug them into."
There are companies that will transfer your data to some other media. Likewise, there are companies that will transfer old audio and video recordings.
4
@BDV
Yes, but if someone finds one of our hard drives 500 years from now, there may not be anyone around who knows how to access its contents.
1
Uhu: "... if someone finds one of our hard drives 500 years from now ..."
Some people have a ridiculously high opinion of themselves. Those people should build pyramids. Everyone else should worry about bequeathing their digital data to their heirs.
FYI, archaeologists and linguists have deciphered texts that are thousands of years old. Linear A script is one of the few that have not been deciphered.
Do web searches for "Rosetta stone" and "Linear A".
BTW, the real threat is ENCRYPTION, not technological access to the data on hard drives.
1
One of the most delicious experiences I had of my father was discovering a scrapbook he had kept from his youth. Full of matchbook covers, theater bills, photos, receipts, it signified some of the highlights of his early life and represented a precious snapshot of that for me. I plan to leave similar breadcrumbs and ephemera of my life for my heirs to enjoy.
7
I found a bag with a perfectly preserved collection of letters from high school and college friends and boyfriends 20 years after I had graduated from college. It was an extraordinarily beautiful experience to read them again and remember who I had been. I remember sitting and reflecting and writing about what I was observing and feeling. It is not just the memories but the experience of reflection that we are losing.
66
@Theresa
I, too, have found that this review of young adult letters brought back vivid memories of a person I had been, a person I had forgotten. They brought back broader memories of an entire time and place. Without them, I would have lost all but a sketchy, superficial sense of my past.
I am lucky enough to have a package of the notes my best friend passed to me during high school classes---late 1960's---elaborately decorated with her calligraphy and folded into tiny squares. We used code names for the people we knew, based on some of the names John Lennon constructed in In His Own Write. It was such a hoot!
3
Off-shoring embodied memory - since the written transcription of oral tales from neuronal structure to papyrus or vellum - is ongoing. As Plato warned, this process sundered our embodied relationships w/ the world and w/ each other. Flash-forward to the wholesale disembodiment of Self into the (carbon belching) Cloud. Truth is less stable, memory more fragile, and human relation is driven by digital protocol. Three issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage:
1 - the process of creating the artifact: Making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self step out of living and mediate their presence while operating the artifact-making device. The observer affects that which is observed: the act of making memory artifacts affects the scenario that is being recorded.
2 - when these processes are taken over by a technology, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. Cloud computing is a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact -- its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, distribution, demise -- wholly out of the purview of the individual creator.
3 - the maintenance of archive. As an ordered system, the archive requires energy influx to maintain order. The energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy are folks willing to dispense of or provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of the archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?
3
I can not imagine my life without those beautiful family photos not only with my parents and brother but also with my own children and husband. When our daughters were born and as they grew, we always took pictures, lots of them. And it's profound how life is. During our 2017 Santa Rosa fire, I and my neighbors had to be evacuated with nothing but the clothes on our backs. As I stayed with a relative for a week until it was safe to return to my still-standing home, all I could think of was those albums upon albums of my loved ones, my wedding ring given to me over 50 years' ago, the gifts given to me by my deceased parents, and our library of "real" books. You see...it was my life that I needed at that time, all there to hold and to treasure. So happy to say, we are together again.
32
In 2016, the year the Chicago Cubs won the series, my husband went to 44 Cub games and saved every ticket stub. He had a feeling that the Cubs has a real chance that year and wanted to have a record of all the games he attended.
Right before game one of the series, he laid every ticket on our dining room table and called me in. It was amazing to look at all of the tickets, arranged in order of games played. It made everything about that magical season feel more special.
Recording history, even our personal ones, is important and I feel a real sense is sadness that so many of the items that mark milestones in our lives are disappearing.
My husband went to two World Series games and all his 46 tickets are in a frame on his office wall. A reminder of that season and now, sadly, a bygone era.
8
In my quick browse through these comments (there are 39 so far) I’m seeing a lot of readers either print out or save their emails in their native programs, but you can also convert them to PDF or other formats, depending upon which software you have. PDF has the benefit of being more universally readable, usable without having to have the email program up and running.
12
I have thought about this a lot, as I love going through old letters , postcards, and photos.
It's not a substitute, but a few years ago I started keeping a mailbox designated "Letters" whenever I send or receive an email commemorating a particularly special or significant life event, or anytime I get an email from family or friends that I feels captures their essence, or a funny or poignant story. Before I retire this computer, I will print out every email in that mailbox. It's not the same as old letters, but it is something physical for me to read through in my dotage!
9
I love the emails I have kept from corresponding with and about my kids over the years. The teen years being the most entertaining. I should print them out now before some glitch takes them from me. For example: Dear Principal Smith, my son informs me that no one cares about plagiarism at the school. Would you like to confirm? or Dear Son, I do not care what Chippy and Buffy want, they cannot sign out from the school and say they are coming to our house unless they are indeed coming to our house. Shall I call Chippy and Buffy's parents to confirm? Priceless stuff.
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Some of my favorite tangible items are tied up in travel. I send and receive postcards to this day. My postcard collection is arrayed on a shelf with two globes, suitably. I also keep travel journals and sketchbooks. The sketchbooks in particular evoke reveries of a trip more than any photo, perhaps because of the time spent interacting with a scene.
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Sigh. Yet another downside, and probable "unintended consequence" of technology - the disappearance of ephimera. Are philosophers keeping track of the many downsides, ethical questions, losses, and disasters happening due to technology, or are we only celebrating its material gains for the few and "convenience" for the many?
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Many of us wish that gmail and yahoo and other web-based email providers made it significantly easier and less time consuming to save our emails locally (not on cloud) and to print them en mass, not one by one.
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Years ago, when working abroad, back when international phone calls were exorbitant, email was just in infancy, and letters took weeks to arrive, I kept in touch with friends and family by fax. It still seems miraculous to this day that one could write a letter, pop it in a fax machine, and it would appear more or less in your own handwriting for the repicient to savor. And the best part for me was that I retained the fax letters that I wrote. These became a journal of sorts that I would have lost had I mailed "real" letters.
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@Christine Make sure you copy those faxes on acid-free paper! Those rolls of 'fax paper' are very fugitive--I've lost hundreds over the years as the images and text just ghosted off the paper...
Yes, the digital paperless era has arrived, to our affective loss. We humans have an intellect that prides itself in being able to reason and use common sense to reach scientific conclusions, useful or not. But it pales compared to our emotional life, the one we live with, day in and day out, and which gives us our greatest satisfaction as social beings. And worth remembering, with pictures in hand.
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Beautifully put. Thank you.
Now I wish I could easily print out your comment.
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@MSW
I copy and paste great comments into a Word document that is my daily journal. Interacting with the New York Times and the great people who comment here gives me pleasure, so I like to add it to my everyday jottings.
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I have returned to film photography when my son was born (2014). I want to have physical records in the form of high quality negatives and slides of his and my daugher’s childhood. I have been pleasantly surprised at the ever growing variety of film you can buy nowadays. In fact, film photography is experiencing a sustained and significant comeback. It is a magical feeling to know that when the shutter clicks a permanent image has formed that you cannot immediately see. The anticipation and excitement of seeing the developed film and the final result is also worth the wait. I also realize that by being limited to 36 shots, makes each much better. I would really recommend everyone to go back to film. Not for everyday use, but for special occasions or trips it is really worth it. Choose a good lab ( there are many), good film, a good camera and enjoy!
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@Watchman I haven't made the switch back to film (though I've retained those other analog media, LP and cassette), but you are right about better pictures. Recently digitizing my Ektachrome slides from past trips, I marveled at how each one was a carefully composed, luminous little pictorial statement. I haven't been able to abandon my 1981 Nikon, and maybe this is a nudge to go full-on, no excuses retro.
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@Watchman: I too have returned to film photography, and with a mission in mind. I am systematically photographing buildings, store interiors, people and events in our community — including many things nobody would think to point a camera at. My goal is to amass a "time capsule" from 2019 for our local museum. Kept in climate-controlled conditions, these film negatives should last more than a century, and will preserve images of our time that do not require a machine in order to be decoded or understood. The notion that we live in a "digital dark age" is very real, and we do ourselves no favors by entrusting so much history to digital storage media.
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@Watchman the great Irish photographer John Minihan still works almost exclusively in film-- he's known for astonishing portraits of Samuel Becket and others. You can find his work online (the irony, I know!)
All too true. I have a diary from my years at college. My grandchildren won't be able to read it; it's in cursive script.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end but they're going fast.
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There’s a great screenplay here. Someone should write it, stored in the cloud. The movie will be a dystopian blockbuster. But no one will ever own the DVD, it will stream-only.
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And every so often be inaccessible, have parts of it mysteriously deleted or moved to a different folder in the cloud.
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I agree that there is something, actually a lot of something, to be said for printing out pictures. In 10, 20, 30 years, when todays kids who are having kids, want to look back at their kids will digital, in it's ever changing and different formats, be there? Who knows but printed pics, if put in the proper shoe box, will be there.
Just do it.
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Yes, and best is printed on acid-free paper and stored in an acid-free box with a lid and in a temperature-controlled (not too hot not too cold) and dry place.
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in a building that never loses power or catches on fire or is flooded?
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@MSW
And away from inspects and rodents and wayward dogs and cats. And toddlers or angry teenagers.
Back to the Stone Age (literally), when there was no paper )or papyrus or cuneiform tablets) to save.
The irony is that we're going there thanks to "high tech"
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@ROI
an interesting question is what will take us back to the Stone Age quicker: technology or Trump.
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I printed out an email reply from Noam Chomsky and put it on my wall with all my physical tickets. I can't find the words to describe the joy it gives me that he took the time to reply to me. Those few sentences that he wrote give me so much joy--they will for years to come.
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@Randeep Chauhan When Barack Obama was elected President, each of our children hand-wrote him a letter congratulating him. Later, each child received a gracious letter from him. Yes, all three are identical form letters with machine-signed signatures. But, still, what brilliant, tactile keepsakes for them from a historical event!
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@Insatiably Curious
I'm taking my parents to see Bill and Hillary Clinton next month--I'm gunna save those tickets. I've never done anything like this for them so it is a memory I will cherish my entire life. I think it's amazing your kids wrote to the president!
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Actually, gmail/hotmail and Apple are doing the job of saving for me.
I go back and read the old emails from time to time.
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I have an ancient email account that I maintain because it has the last emails my brother wrote to me before he died.
And some of us never bother deleting email given the effectiveness of modern search engines and free storage space if we just turn over our privacy.
So yes, people collect old email.
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@Rebecca
Be sure to print them out soon, so you'll be sure to have them in the event of a corporate data heist or accidental deletion by you, your kids, your grandma, or the email provider.
Seriously.
Peter Funt collects stuff as an adult because he is wise enough to know it will come in handy for future nostalgia, which he will enjoy and will find useful for jogging faded memories, just as most of us do.
Kids, especially very small kids, collect an odd assortment of stuff because it is calming and comforting.
Large toys are meant to be played with until they break or the child outgrows them. Playing with those bigger toys is sort of the 9-to-5 job for young kids.
Little bits of stuff, including a small piece broken off an old toy and found under a couch months later, and things found outside next to a neighbor’s driveway or a small cardboard box or a tiny magnifying glass are the really important things.
When you are 3 or 4 years old, parents and older siblings run your life with the best of intentions. It is important to have a private life when you lie down for a nap and self-reflect. It is the most important quiet time for developing a personality.
For small children today, it is not the digital age of email which impedes memories. It is, unfortunately, the intrusion of the games available on little iPads.
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Not all correspondence need be saved ... just the lovely ones that make up the beats of my heart. And not all that makes my heart beat is only email. Memories are incorporated into daily use.
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I have emails organized and archived by year since 1998. That’s 21 years of emails, totaling around 100 GB. Most is junk, but I have sifted through it not long ago for an email I received circa 2003. I found.
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BDV
"... I wouldn’t begin to know how or where to find them [old emails]."
OK, but someone else might. Funt says nothing about what kind of computer he uses or what email services he has used.
In the simplest case, old emails might be on an old computer.
In the ideal case, all emails would be backed up on permanent media such as a CD, DVD, or hard drive.
Apple's Time Machine software makes it very easy to automatically back up everything to a hard drive. What does Funt do to back up his computer?
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@BDV what year did gmail start? how did you get email (or after) that happened? how many email providers did you ever use? did you always download all your email to your local drive (POP-based email) or did you access it remotely (IMAP-based) ? Assuming that you use gmail (likely but not guaranteed), have you ever made a backup of your gmail inbox?
I've been sending email since about 1985, and although I am fastidious about backups, there are huge periods for which I have nothing at all.
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Paul: "... gmail ..."
Google offers an account recovery service: "Recover your Google Account or Gmail" (support.google.com).
And it is also possible backup gmail: "How to backup Gmail: The ultimate guide" (zdnet.com).
Paul: "... did you access it remotely (IMAP-based) ?"
Some people don't realize that they may have to *configure* classic email programs to download their emails.
Still, it might be possible to get backups from the email service provider. A good starting point would be with the email address -- look in paper files or ask friends and relatives.
For more, do a web search for "recover old emails".
Not only the “archiving” of memories has changed - also what is considered to be memorable. I do not recall that my parents ever took a picture of a great dinner plate in a nice restaurant - like it seems to be more and more common now. In fact: the dinner became certainly more colorful and delicious in our memories than it ever was. Building a story around events is at least as important as the event itself - but we don’t do that anymore neither. Everything can be verified in a split second thanks to google and friends - and we are increasingly “retiring” our imagination. I actually believe that the permanent documentation of every step in our lives is ultimately killing what it is meant to preserve: our memories.
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We've kept all our tax records and bill payment journals going back 50 years. Went through them all a few years back. Believe me, things were a whole lot cheaper back then. Of course I was making $4.02 an hour in 1967 too. Lots of memories in those records.
I guess it kinda all works out.
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@cherrylog754 Adjusted for inflation, $4.02/hr back then would be $30.70/hr today. Puts the very low value of today's minimum wage in stark relief.
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@cherrylog754 This will probably be valuable to historians. Will them to your local history museum!
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Yes, I printed them out contemporaneously. Our Long distance romance began in 2001 after a chance meeting. I printed out and kept every email. I left my job, gorgeous home in Boca Ramon and I moved in with him. He lived in NY. We got married. He died 6 months later. But I still cherish our emails.
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I do. My dad retired and is now traveling the world. He sends emails with stories from his travels. I've printed out every one of his emails and saved them. I also print hard copies of photos and put them in albums, which are so much more satisfying to look at than scrolling through tiny photos on a digital screen.
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Yes- some people DO save emails. I've archived hundreds since I first began emailing far-flung friends back in 1992. Email then was still a relative novelty, and I enjoy looking back on them and remembering what a thrill it was to find a message waiting in the Inbox.
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I have all of my relevant e-mails going back to January 1995. They are organized into more than 200 folders, in a hierarchy. With hundreds of filters to place them.
I still use Eudora. I can easily search to see if I have corresponded with the person before. And about what. Or what I bought when.
As for family photos -- and information on the former family business -- I put them on the web. At least the older ones with family members or property pictured. They are all organized on my family business website, but then I have been hand coding in HTML since March 1996.
I hope to get pictures from other branches of the family to scan and add. I know where they are.
But you ask what happens after I die? I expect I will set up a foundation to keep the site alive.
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@Don Wiss
Yikes!!
Take a look at studies on fake memories. Without documentation that is non-digital and unalterable, independent verification will be gone. How to corroborate history if it is digital and alterable?
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@Eric, Only hope official records don't go digital without hard copies. Nowadays a lot of forms are filled out online and perhaps kept in digital form only.
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I’m 32 and complain about the loss of tangible keepsakes all the time. The psychological and sociological effects of this digitization of experiences is yet to be determined, and I can guarantee it is mostly negative (see: Fortnight)
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And, what about the old photos as well?
Yes
, we also have collections of old concert tickets, etc., but we also have 30-40 photo albums dating back more than 50 years to before our kids were born, and documenting their lives, and ours. And no one seems interested. Even when we try a “nudge” and lay out one old album before kids and grandkids come, no one is interested. Is history itself dead? Left only to archivists, not part of people’s lives anymore?
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@Ken Mace For these kids, Facebook defines history. Scanners are getting better, faster, cheaper and they might take a look if up on your Facebook history.
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@Ken Mace
Very sorry for you about this!
When I was a child, I loved hearing my grandmother and her sisters tell stories about their childhoods and I loved all our family photos. When I married, my husband and I spent many happy times with his mother looking at her collection of old pictures and family movies. We have interviewed her for Story Corps.
Now I discover that many people I meet are not even remotely curious about others. And certainly not about those they meet socially--they can know each other for years over breakfasts and at parties and never seek to learn what the person once did for a living, whether they grew up with siblings, what their interest are, etc. Are they also indifferent to family history?
Why do people vary in these ways? Are some folks just emotionally disconnected from others?
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Does anyone collect old emails?
Yes. Google. Ten-duotrigintillions of them.
Though I shudder at the thought that ALL my emails might be read by my kids someday. Time to lock down those passwords!
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