Doing some organizing & cleaning up recently I came across a box I hadn’t opened in many many years. Decades ago in HS and college I saved essays, official letters, transcripts, my schedule for the quarter, and a lot of other mundane stuff. Nothing earthshaking in there, just evidence once I was a kid.
It was a few pleasant minutes of nostalgia to go thru the box but now I’m wondering what to do with it. I can’t see it being of interest or use to anyone else, and clearly I could live without it since it sat unopened for so long. So I’m leaning towards tossing it.
I’m curious if other people have stuff like this packed away and if they plan to keep it.
I keep some of mine that I think my kids might like to see one day, but not a ton of stuff. When I cleaned out my parents’ stuff it was nice to be able to see their old report cards and schoolbooks.
I just finished cleaning out my mother’s home. Boxes of my deceased sibling’s stuff everywhere from elementary school through college, just as you’ve described . Please do your family a favor - toss it!
I have many yearbooks plus a bunch of stuff saved from high school (by my mom, in stuff she stored at my house) and me. This year I went through a lot of it… thinned it out but kept some of my favorite things. I finally boxed up most of my 1980s engineering textbooks for hard-to-recycle center.
I loved looking at my parents HS yearbooks when I was a kid. I don’t think my kids have ever looked at mine or H’s.
I never kept papers,notebooks, textbooks or anything like that. I have a box of some HS stuff somewhere (dead corsages from prom/homecoming). Maybe I threw it out.
The only college stuff is from my sorority. I gave most of my T shirts, hats, etc to younger sisters but I do have at least one T. Can’t bear to give it away as it has the greek letters on it
Husband and I went to the same university - large state school. Between our overlapping years and staying at the same school for grad studies we had 7 yearbooks. Large, heavy, never looked at books filling an entire shelf. Last year I took a razor blade and sliced out the few pages that had pictures of either of us or activities/clubs we were part of. I also took the multi-page photo essay that introduced the year at the front of each volume. Total of about 50 pages at most are now in a file folder. Haven’t decided if I’m going to scrapbook them or just scan. Dumped the rest. It felt good.
Up to you. My dad (think he was 95 or so at the time) was about to throw out his college yearbooks. I saved them and love them much more than my own. Such a great time capsule! So I have his and ready to throw out my own. Go figure.
I saved textbooks and class notes for a LOT of years. And then one day I looked at all those old class notes and realized they almost looked like Greek. I can’t believe how smart I used to be. I dumped all of them.
I keep a very SMALL amount of some report cards–especially any with teacher comments. I even have a couple from my dad. The rest is gone. Nobody cares. But my dad’s report card with teacher lamenting his handwriting is still worth keeping.
I have my high school yearbooks and that is it. Nothing from any of my colleges including old textbooks. I did keep Greys Anatomy which I gave to my DD.
A project coming up for this winter is to clean out our two crawl spaces (cape cod style house with a crawl space front and rear). I know there are boxes with college notebooks and blue books from exams that nobody wants to keep, my self included.
Same thing with stuff from when the kids were in elementary school. I’m sure we’ll keep a few things but nowhere near the volume of stuff that is there.
I’ve been taking pictures/scanning old things that are a little nostalgic but that I don’t need the original. Trying real hard to do that with all the kid artwork in the boxes in the basement, too.
On my mother’s last lucid day (bedridden, two days before she died), she and my had a delightful afternoon reviewing some of her old stuff. Elementary school report cards from the 1930s/40s, photo album from her young adult church outings (where she me my dad), old photo albums. Mostly I left them alone, chattering and laughing… just poked my head in now and then to enjoy the moment.
Interestingly the report cards and lots of other old stuff were in a tin that mom had said “toss it” when we were moving her to my house. Glad I didn’t.
I thinned mine out to one box. Anything that I didn’t enjoy that much I threw away. Things that made me smile I kept. I might want to look at them again in 10 years or so.
It was a surprising fun read. I admire the way the author (“somewhere between age 80 and 100”) was able to over time cull down her memorabilia to one box.
I kept a few things, although most haven’t been seen since our last move. Our college yearbook is online, which is fortunate since mine was ruined in a flood. I have a few letters that H wrote to me when we were apart during our college years, as well as a very few photos of that time.
What I need to do is severely cut down on the photos from the past 45 years that we keep. I got rid of two large bins before our last move, but still have another two bins full. Some old photo albums didn’t survive, or they damaged the photos. I’d like to scan whatever’s important to us then also have some not-too-big photo books made for our kids and grandchildren.
Just this week I was going through stuff and found a unique box. Just a brown box, old and ratty. It has some things of my mother’s, and a few of my father’s, and then a few things that had to have been added by my grandfather (father’s family). Maybe my mother added them after my grandfather died as he was living with us. There were pictures and diplomas from jr high and high school for both (same small town, different years in school). Some pictures of my mother’s family. A dance card from a college dance. A newspaper essay contest that my mother won (she was NOT a writer or this type of person) “what would you say to child in Russia” (probably 1950?). There was a booklet from the 50th wedding anniversary party for my grandmother’s brother, and that was very interesting to read as the grandchildren were some of the 2nd cousins we played with, but other cousins hadn’t been born yet. It was an interesting read.
But I took them to my sister. I’ve read through them and my kids won’t care. If she wants to say and store them, have at it. Fun to read through, but I won’t do it again.
I think it was kind of sad that my mother didn’t display some of the pictures or even have them in albums, but she had a hard family life growing up.
I have yearbooks from my senior years of high school and college only. Some prom pics and college formal pics. And a few snapshots along the way. No true memorabilia. I had kept some including a scrapbook from my senior year of high school. That was fun to pull out when ds was a senior. But, when we did the big downsize, I tossed it.
I’m just gonna say that I, for one, am glad cameras were not so readily available as they are now
Probably too much. But I’ve been slowly getting rid of some of it.