Treasure? Or Toss?

 

It's time for the pre-Thanksgiving grind at our house. Before we cook, we clean. That includes a purge of old files and personal papers through the shredder, a monotonous task on a clunker of a machine that requires forty minutes of R&R for every five minutes of labor. Such a deal for the machine—human laborers should have such an employment contract.

Spread across my dining room table at the moment are the dregs of past research forays into the deepest recesses of my family tree. A ten year old Christmas newsletter from my cousin, still needing the birth of his great-granddaughter added to the official family tree makes one easily-dispatched task, but I hesitate to toss the next item: a list of each photography studio named in the collection of Tully pictures on loan to me over a decade ago. For some records, I'm on the fence: toss? Or treasure?

Gradually, over the past decades, I've made the switch from paper records to online records for my family history, but there is a price to the tradeoff. Scanning records may eliminate paper mountains, but come with an organizational price tag. We still need to develop a way to find all those records we've stored electronically.

Every time I congratulate myself on streamlining my paper records—during the forty minutes I'm waiting for my shredder to cool down again—I seem to find additional reminders that the paper purge is not finished. Witness this week's effort to reduce my genealogical footprint—at least in my office space.

Come Thanksgiving Day, miraculously, all the clutter will be gone—but whether the issue will be resolved is another question. I constantly amaze myself with how many more files from the past seem to find their way to the surface in time for another vacation break.