How did you clear out paperwork/mementoes/photos etc after your parents died?

[Rafting2022]

My mum died nearly 10 years ago and my dad over 30 years ago and I’ve finally got round to clearing out the final bits of paperwork/mementoes/photos etc. (Part of home renovation project/de-cluttering.)

I need some tips on how to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I’m talking things like birth certificates, marriage certificate, old school reports, letters, cards etc that have been in the loft for years.

Probably about 3 storage boxes altogether.

Would be great to have some way to keep a few items that could easily be looked at from time to time and tips on how to be ruthless on getting rid of the rest!

Thanks in advance.

You get them all digitalised and store on a cloud online

Three piles - keep, chuck, maybe. Keep whittling down the maybe pile till you have a manageable pile to keep.

Get rid of school reports, keep official things like birth certificates. The letters and cards - if there's a for oak fee that remind you if your parents or mark a special occasion then keep, otherwise chick. Photos I'd keep (unless crappy 'who is that' type).
File the certificates in a folder, put the sentimental stuff in a special keepsake box.
I don't agree with digitising it all - letters and photos have an inherent quality in their original form.

I keep repeating what the Life Laundry woman said.
"These are not YOUR memories."
That combined with a dose of Marie Kondo (How does this item make you feel? Guilty? Off it goes!) works wonders.

Following as I need tips!!

I would say as a parent of a child with sen, it's been eye opening reading my dad's school reports! I've decided to add those to ancestry.com in case they mean something to his future grandkids down the line and give some insight.

i kept official things like birth /death/marriage cert and photos unless i had no idea who the people were ,my sister would have gotten rid of the photos but i do like a photo

birth certificates, marriage certificate

frame for display any that are fancy / antique & digitise others.

old school reports, letters, cards

Any hand written by family I'd keep unless just a few best wishes type words.

I have a photo album with some of these types of documents in it, especially vintage postcards that are dense with family greetings.

Old Photos I upload & share widely; they are heritage of many not just me.

I am really struggling with this myself. Mum died 15 years ago and I have SO MANY photos of her. I'm trying to only keep the best and only one of each type, but I cannot bring myself to throw away a single one. There are literally hundreds and I sit to look at them and end up in tears, packing them all back into the boxes. I need to get sorted but I just do not know how, it's like throwing out little bits of my heart and I just can't do it.

If you keep photos, write the names on the back in pencil. Very useful for further generations. Otherwise chuck as much as you can. If it's in the loft anyway your not going to miss it.

We’re in the same position but with much more stuff, and have been busily scanning almost everything we can find for weeks now (and cataloguing the scans as we go, so we can find them again easily). Paperwork that’s been scanned can be destroyed as soon as at least one backup has been taken; relatively modern photographs likewise, though in general we’re keeping (and likewise cataloguing) the negatives.

All photos of previous generations are being kept, but documented on their backs wherever possible, then scanned and uploaded to Ancestry.com. All photo scans are being done at high resolution, because trying to save disk space makes no sense when a single hard drive can store more photos than you could realistically take in a lifetime, and you want to be sure that any photo could be printed at some time in the future without it looking blurred or fuzzy.

Try to adopt a consistent dating notation for the scanned images: speaking personally, I find that YYYY/MM/DD followed by a small number of key words works well because (a) files get automatically listed in date order within their respective directories and (b) images for which you only know the year (or even just the decade) still fit into the system. For key words, don’t use “Mum”, “Gran”, “Auntie Flo” etc because it won’t mean anything to future generations: use their full names. Take multiple regular backups (and/or keep copies in the Cloud) as you go, or a hardware failure when you’re 95% finished would be a disaster.

It’s a massive task in our case, but it only has to be done once - and of course when it’s complete, sending the entire collection to every relative who’d like a copy will then take only a few minutes.

Good luck :)

The way my mum sorts through her things I doubt there will be a lot left to keep. She moved in her Eighties and is still going through boxes.

My PIL went digital as soon as the first digital camera came out. They then spent one winter working through all paper photos and scanned them in with detailled description of time, location and the people, full names so DH knows them instead of just "dad". DH already has some and we will just add the whole lot. to our cloud storage.

I already got my dad's photos from the army which we also scanned and together with all other photos are in a cloud. My mum's will follow when I get them.

We have a digital photo frame and there are also photos of DH's family coming up, DD especially loves the ones of her grandparents being children/teens.

Letters - in my opinion letters are between the writer and the person they were intended for. We are not famous or of national importance so any letter and diaries will be destroyed.

Report cards - they can be very interesting but I think I would scan them instead of keeping originals.

Obviously things like original certificats will be kept, scanned first and then ending in the same place where our are.

I love the fact that I've got the mementos my gran kept. Get a ring binder and put documents in poly pockets in it. I can't imagine you've got more than 2 lever arch folders worth and surely you have room for that?

Your DGC may cherish them and once gone aren't replaceable.

Some advice for everyone - I have cleared out my own photo collection of 60 years. I kept the photos of people and important events and put them in albums, in date order and fully labelled and passed them onto my DS and his DC. I cleared two shelves in the study.

I did it as a process. I kept birth certificates, death certificates and photos. It was so hard for my DF because I wanted to keep everything. I also kept anything he had handwritten

I'm just about to begin working on this but, as I have some (mild) difficulty with learning, I would like to find out how to back up from my Windows PC. I know it must be simple but I have no one to help and would appreciate any simple pointers as I have trouble following the procedure shown on some sites. Thank you and good luck to you all working through this task.

I’ve been doing this recently. My mum had kept decades worth of cards. Also all our school reports.

I threw out all of them.

I went through the hundreds of photos and threw out all except ones with people (we knew) in. Next job is to get them scanned so we can all have access.

My parents also had at least 100 memorial cards of friends/family that have died over the years. I threw out these too. As someone says upthread, these were their memories and not ours.

So all we have kept really is photos, and only about 50% of what was there. I was pretty ruthless, but the last thing I wanted was to bring home boxes of stuff that I’d have put in my loft and then my kids would be disposing of if in years to come.

Some good advice here.

Re report cards. I had a leather bound book with my reports in, filled in every year and meant to be kept. When I found it a few years ago I had horrid flashbaçks of school and binned it. With hindsight, I should have kept it so my DDs could read about how lazy and cheeky I was 😉

@Izitso When my PIL in Germany started their organising they spoke to a company who went through several options with them. They basically tailor made a back-up and uploading system for them.

It was a charity who deals with IT help for elderly, disabled or just utterly clueless people so that they are not being pulled over by commercial companies and paying for stuff they don't need and still don't understand.

You pay what you can afford for their help and then what programm you buy. They finance themselves via donation and often the people do this kind of things as their day job and volunteer their time for the charity.

I am sure there must be. something like this in the UK as well.

reluctantbrit thank you so much for that. I shall look into it this afternoon. I would be more than happy to pay for help.