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[personal profile] poliphilo
'T'other thing we need to do is convert the study into a bedroom for carers to sleep in when we have them staying the week. Up until now Ailz and I have ceded our bedroom to them but it's always been a pain and the more embedded we become the less happy we are to do it. This is now our home and we hate having to pack away all our personal stuff (and there's getting to be quite a lot of it) every time we return to Oldham. I raised the matter with my mother this morning- thinking I might have to argue the case- and she agreed without demur.

Converting the study will involve sorting through a lot of lovingly stored rubbish- old radios, film projectors, business files- and discarding most of it. My parents were devils for keeping official paper- Every tax return, every old cheque book, every ledger, every appointments diary. i was doing a preliminary search yesterday afternoon and found stuff relating to the engineering firm my father left in the '60s.  Mixed in with the dross are more personal items- photograph albums going back to the '20s, my father's naval commission and discharge papers, my grandfather's gold watch. I have hazy thoughts about creating a properly annotated family archive. This morning I looked in a drawer I hadn't searched before and found my father's passport from the late '40s. He was in the business of selling tractors and such like heavy plant and did a lot of travelling- the USA, Egypt, West Germany, France, somewhere in Eastern Europe I can't decipher.  I offered to take him to Egypt in the mid '80s and he said he'd done it and didn't care to repeat the experience- the flies, the beggars- so I took my mother instead.

Date: 2014-01-29 12:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] resonant.livejournal.com
It's hard sorting through paper. Lots of work, little volume of stuff discarded.

Date: 2014-01-29 05:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
But I rather enjoy it. There's always the chance of finding something interesting or even valuable.

Date: 2014-01-29 01:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] artkouros.livejournal.com
Keep the best, toss the rest. I boxed up bails of old bills and paperwork from my dad's office - and it only went back 10 years. We took it all to my sister's in the country and burned it.

Date: 2014-01-29 05:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
We own a brazier. :)

Date: 2014-01-29 03:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pondhopper.livejournal.com
Good luck with the sorting though you may find some interesting things as you go about it.

Date: 2014-01-29 05:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
We already have- in particular a lot of materials relating to my father's early life.

Date: 2014-01-29 04:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cmcmck.livejournal.com
On the paperwork front my MiL had kept not only her own but her two late sisters' stuff and there were wartime ration books and ID cards and medical notes from the forties and such! Some of it was genuinely fascinating!

Date: 2014-01-29 05:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
My father served in a RN bomb disposal unit. Among the things that have turned up are photos of chaps standing round bombs in muddy fields.

Date: 2014-01-29 06:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cmcmck.livejournal.com
In our case, chaps in kilts standing around in somewhere that was then India but is now Pakistan.

Date: 2014-01-29 06:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] faunhaert.livejournal.com
lots of treasures
those pictures would be valuable some one
probably a museum
would be great to have a face recognition software
of the future that would have potential descendants

any of them look like your dad?
wish he'd labeled them

we got to go thru a century farm
nothing had been tossed
bundles of letters in chronological order
never opened very pretty handwriting in norwegian.
hope they didn't get lost-
nothing i could keep it went into the guys over full house
lost to antiquity .. maybe he gave it to the 'sons of norway'
his wife is still there
she doesn't know
le sigh

glad she din't fight you

Date: 2014-01-29 08:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
My father is in one of the bomb photos. As for the rest I suppose he must have been the photographer.

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