I'm reminded of Swedish death cleaning [1]. If I don't die outright, I'll try to do as much for my daughters.
When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.)
Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought.
The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste.
A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years.
This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay.
I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma.
Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning
We should think of mementos as going through a distillation process or something. For the original owner, the set exists as a reminder of their whole younger life—throwing parties with overcomplicated settings and finally getting into the middle class.
For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces.
These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill.
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
This article came at a very apposite time for me, I inherited a lot of family heirlooms and have spent the last three years avoiding doing anything with them, not knowing much about where they came from or why I ended up with them. A lot of glassware and silver plate, some crockery, lamps etc.
In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it.
I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them.
If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.
Heirlooms are one thing but collections of mass produced items are a real drain on children to dispose of. We are working thru my mother in laws storage locker, 30+ yrs in storage, currently $5000/yr. The locker was 10x10 and 100 percent stuffed. To get work room, we rented three lockers to sort the material. We now have one locker with 20 antique clocks, one locker full of porcilin lladros, and another one with furniture. And the original locker is still a challenge. So much of this should never have been acquired.
And I still have my parents wedding silverware, 1958, still in the original wrappers.
I come from poverty relative to the United States and never want to let go of things, electronics having been the hardest to acquire in my childhood. My wife comes from being middle-class America and correctly perceives these fast outdated things as pure carrying cost, worthless in the near future.
A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility.
Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
Jerry Seinfeld, on the life of things we buy:
1. buy treadmill from Amazon with one click, delivered to your door
2. put it in the living room corner
3. after a while, put it in the garage
4. more time passes, move it to the storage unit
5. take it to the dump
Amazon could do us all a favor, and have one-click send it directly to the dump.
It's because life moves faster now.
My wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do.
I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things.
Time to make myself another cup.
I inherited a family cabin. It's nice - I'm there right now. Rural WI, fiber connection, fireplace, on a lake, etc but god does it suck up the money. I'm looking forward to giving it to someone in the next generation but I have to wait until one of them has a job that can afford the upkeep.
My ILs have traveled the world and have a home full of things they've purchased and loved. My FIL's parents passed away about 15 years ago. It took my FIL years to go through all that stuff and figure out what to do with it.
They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests.
I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.
No mention of size of houses either. I have great grandparents who had farms, parents with big 4 bed houses who have now passed. Meanwhile I'm in a two bedroom with kids. Not much room for that grand piano, antiques & book collections.
Having gone through this exercise recently, silver is typically only valuable if it’s not plated and then only for the metal. Unless you have some really special pattern that someone else wants, it will be melted down for other uses.
Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.
This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash.
A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
Very interesting read. As someone who inherited the ancestors house which is 90+ years old, its really a fascinating read.
I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it.
But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix.
So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse).
My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new.
Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself?
Interesting read! Thank you.
family Heirlooms are basically junk as far as resell goes. many are surprised to learn grandma's cutlery or trinkets isn't worth the price paid to apprise it. This goes for collectables in general. People think that if their collectables maybe go up that they made a good deal, but they would have been way better off putting the money in the S&P 500.
It could be worse, you could have spent money to store a bunch of furniture or other things you'll never use for a decade, out of a sense of obligation to someone who isn't around anymore to tell you how stupid you're being, and just get rid of it.
8500+ ft² Victorian, with every last thing to fill it in style, and every last thing that was purchased along the way, functional, identifiable, or niether, objects going back generations, 2~300 lbs of photos and negatives 2500 + books, very large furniture,and mountains of pure junk in a never emptyied out in 165 years attic.12 or more full pickup loads to the dump, and 3 or 4 to the local hospital donation, thrift store.
Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen
selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.
When we bought our house, we offered to buy it as-is so the owners wouldn't have to sort through it. This may have helped our bid win even if it wasn't the highest. It was actually pretty interesting looking through the lives of the previous owners.
I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.
I am from a European country with a long… very long history, some of the family heirlooms date back to Byzantium. I don’t live in that country anymore, and I live in terror of inheriting them… I could give them to a museum, yet asides from that feeling like a betrayal, I know it will mostly just sit in a box till it rots away. Maybe making it out to an exhibit once per 30 years.
I feel like we are all losing interest in our past.
Sigh, sorry to the author that your mom wasn’t into mid-century design.
Silver is anti microbial; eating on silver may well be very beneficial.
Since silver is important in making the front contacts of solar cells, sell that old unused silverware blackening in the drawer and help replace fossil fuels.
Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.