I definitely know what you mean.
I had to help clear out an aunt's house fairly recently[my uncle died just 6 months before her].
Trying to piece together who was who[lots of photographs unmarked], was impossible in some cases. Such a shame. Though as I write this, I have just realised that there is one relative left who could shed some light on a few of them.
And we could have talked and learned more about great grandfather. And great great grandfather.
Gransnet forums
Blogs
The things we should've asked
As the self-confessed owner of a 'mini museum' filled with Items of Sentimental Value, Iona Grey was surprised to come across boxes of (neatly organised) memories while clearing out her godmother's house. She wonders whether conversations about important documents were the ones she should really have been having with her much loved godmother before she died...
Iona Grey - proud owner of a 'mini museum'
I am not an organised person. While I like nothing better than a soothing hour on Pinterest, browsing boards filled with photos of neat shelves and cupboards and under-stairs office spaces where everything is ruthlessly ordered in rainbow-coloured boxes, admiration never quite gets translated into organisational activity. I have a large box in the bottom of my wardrobe which is the official home for Items of Sentimental Value, but as I can't bear to throw out anything that holds a memory or tells a story - no matter how short or incomplete - my whole house is in danger of becoming a mini museum, its drawers and cupboards stuffed with crumbling Hama bead creations, drawings, receipts from happy days out, and sweetly misspelt notes. ('Do'nt forget: I DO NOT want maynays on my samwich')
Two years ago, my elderly and much loved godmother died and, as she had no children of her own, it fell to my brother and I to clear her house. We had known her all our lives. She and her husband had lived next door to our parents when we were born and provided a sort of local grandparenting service, as our real relatives were spread out between Dorset and the Highlands of Scotland. Their home, with its china figurines and 1950s furniture became part of the landscape of our childhood. We went there on Mondays after school, and were sometimes allowed (it always felt like a treat, though I suppose it must have been because our parents were going out) to stay the night, lying beneath the rose-patterned bedspread on the Old Charm bed as she sang us a lullaby (a service that was never offered at home!).
I might never know the stories, but there's one thing I have learned from the tins in my godmother's garage and that's to be a more careful curator of my own museum of memories.
When we sorted through the little house, we certainly didn't expect to find anything we hadn't seen a hundred times before. Unlike me, my godmother (who was always known to my brother and me simply as Auntie) was ferociously tidy, and everything was neat, orderly and familiar. Except for the row of Walkers Crisps boxes (circa 1977) on a shelf in the garage, which were neat and orderly but not familiar. We tackled them last, assuming that they would just contain rusty old garden tools and tins of paint and would go straight into the skip in the driveway.
Luckily we checked first. Some did contain tins of paint, and cans of slug pellets and weedkiller (the immaculate garden with its dazzling rows of geraniums and marigolds had never been an homage to organic methods.) Others contained tins of a different kind. Tins that eighty years earlier had contained tea, toffees and biscuits but were now stuffed with photographs, diaries, telegrams, receipts and letters; the names and faces and words and thoughts of strangers long gone.
Over the next few weeks I studied them, piecing together the fragments to make a story, trying to work out connection between people and events. (Was the angelic little girl in the photograph the same child who sent a homemade Easter card to Auntie Sarah and Uncle George in 1934? Was Henry John Skitt, whose black-edged 'In Memoriam' card has the words 'my brother Harry. Died of wounds' poignantly written inside it, one of the fresh-faced boys in the 1915 photograph?) One of the things I loved most about Auntie was listening to the stories of her life, which had become as familiar as the well-polished treasures in her house. Here was the tantalising evidence of so many more that I would never know.
I wish we had looked through them together. I wish that, after the fall that began her slow decline that summer, instead of her telling me where to find her will and the paperwork pertaining to her pension and mortgage, we’d gone through those tins in the garage and she'd told me about Henry John Skitt and Sarah (whose engagement ring I found, along with the receipt for its purchase in 1925) and explained who had travelled on the White Star Line's MV Georgic in 1932 and where the photograph of her on the beach in the extraordinarily glamorous Mad Men style sunglasses had been taken. I could have worked out the pension and the mortgage stuff myself somehow.
I might never know the stories, but there's one thing I have learned from the tins in my godmother's garage and that's to be a more careful curator of my own museum of memories. To be better at filing and organising and more selective about the things that I keep. Goodbye Hama beads. You were fun - sort of - at the time.
Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey published by Simon & Schuster is out now priced £8.99 and available from Amazon.
By Iona Grey
Twitter: @simonschusteruk
Grannyknot What happened? Did you find anything else out of the stoyry?
I do wish I had asked more about older family members, great grandparents and their parents etc. Now all I have is my family history which my son and I did while home schooling but only names, no indication of what the people were like. It would have been wonderful to know. And now with my dad having dementia, his memory of certain things is going too, so still no clearer. Why don't we thing about things like this as a younger person?
I intend to write as much down as I can about my life and then my children, if they want to read it or not, will still have some account of things I did they don't really know about and they will have a lasting memory of me. I do think children think that parents are just parents and didn't have a childhood of their own etc. It's lovely to hear my dad go back to when he was a child and playing out with his mates on the park, playing tennis. He must have loved this time because he keeps going back to it in his recall. I'm going to take him to the park he played at, with a flask and just spend some time together there. 
Join the conversation
Registering is free, easy, and means you can join the discussion, watch threads and lots more.
Register now »Already registered? Log in with:
Gransnet »