How Do You Start a Family Archive?
Family archives usually begin as an inherited box nobody knows what to do with. The instinct is to sort it perfectly before starting, which guarantees nothing happens. The workable order is to gather, then label, then digitise, accepting that the arrangement will improve later.
How do you begin?
Collect everything into one location, including material held by other relatives, and resist discarding anything at this stage. Photographs, letters, documents, recordings and objects. Only once you can see the whole collection can you judge what is significant.
Contacting relatives at this stage does double duty. It surfaces material you did not know existed and identifies who else cares, which matters later when deciding custody. Both are easier now than after someone has cleared a house.
How should it be organised?
By person or family line rather than by format, since that is how anyone will search it. Within each, chronological order works. Keep an inventory listing each item, its location and what is known about it, even a simple spreadsheet.
Format-based sorting, all photographs together, all letters together, feels tidier and makes the archive harder to use. A grandchild wants everything about one great-grandmother, not every photograph regardless of subject.
What should you digitise first?
Anything fragile, anything unique and anything on obsolete media. Deteriorating photographs, letters on acidic paper, cassette tapes and video formats no longer easily played. Robust, duplicated material such as printed books can wait indefinitely.
Obsolete media carries a hidden deadline: the equipment to read it is disappearing faster than the media is decaying. A cassette that still plays fine may become unreadable simply because no working player remains within reach.
Who should own it?
Name someone explicitly, and name a successor. Archives held by nobody in particular disperse during house clearances, precisely when nobody has time to evaluate what matters. A written note of who holds what, shared with the family, prevents most of that loss.
Distributing digital copies widely is the cheapest insurance available. Physical originals can only live in one place, but every relative with a copy of the scans and recordings is another chance the material survives a fire, a flood or a clearance.
Key takeaways
- Gather everything first, including material held by other relatives, before sorting.
- Organise by person or family line, not by format.
- Keep an inventory of what exists, where it is and what is known about it.
- Digitise fragile, unique and obsolete-media items first.
- Name an owner and a successor, and distribute digital copies widely.
Frequently asked questions
- What should you throw away?
- Very little at the start, and nothing before it is catalogued. Duplicates of printed material and badly damaged items with no identifiable content are reasonable candidates once everything is inventoried. Discarding before you understand the collection is how significant items are lost.
- How do you deal with disputes over who keeps what?
- Digitise everything and distribute copies, which removes most of the heat: several people can hold the content even if only one holds the object. For originals, agreeing custody explicitly while everyone is alive prevents the disputes that surface during estate clearance.
- Should you use genealogy software?
- It is useful for relationships and dates and less suited to holding stories, recordings and context. Many families use genealogy tools for the structure and something separate for the narrative material. Whatever you choose, ensure you can export your data.
- How much does an archive cost to maintain?
- Very little in money and some in attention. Archival enclosures and boxes are inexpensive, and cloud storage for a family collection is modest. The real cost is periodic maintenance: checking backups, migrating formats and keeping the inventory current as material is added.
Oral History & Family Archives, BigBalli. We draw on oral history practice from StoryCorps, the Oral History Association and the Library of Congress.