I am beginning a new project, one that is perfect for a newly retired person who needs to learn how to use all of the bonus time she has been given. (What a gift!) Over the years I have inherited a ton of family papers and artifacts. I've used many of them in teaching teachers how to teach history so that children will learn it while falling in love with a fascinating subject. Needless to say, everything is in a bit of a mess because I've never organized things before. There is so much now that I must get a handle on it before I inherit anything else. My goal is to create a family archive, and to this end I have contacted an archivist in the Special Collections Department at Virginia Tech. (I hope to hear back from him tomorrow.) I want to tackle this project in a methodical manner so that the end result will serve two purposes. First, one hundred years from now, no family member will remember my Uncle Richard, so I want to ensure that his artifacts and papers make sense to someone in the future. I want whoever reads Uncle Richard's World War II letters to realize what a treasure they are. Hopefully, future family members will come to know Uncle Richard through what he has left behind. Second, I want to create finding aids that will serve as a model for those who inherit the collection so that they can add to it and create new finding aids for whatever has been added. Perhaps this is a waste of time. I hope not. It seems that every generation in our family has a history buff or two. My daydream is that some day, one of my great-great grandchildren will peruse Uncle Richard's picture album from the front lines of World War II and will want to know about the man who took the pictures. The same is true for the gloves Dad wore when chauffeuring Generals Eishenhower, Bradley, Clark, Groves, and others, or for his Tootsie Toy collection. Imagine someone in 2080 holding toys a boy played with in the 1920s and then learning about his great-great-great grandfather. Won't that make these people real? Won't they come to life? My greatest fear is that no one beyond me will be interested in any of this and will donate the mess to Good Will. I truly don't think that will happen if for no other reason than my descendants will realize I put a ton of work into this project and will want to preserve it.

Lissie