How do we measure the worth of a life? How do we share our legacy with the generations that come after us? These questions are intimidating at any age, but take on increasing urgency as we grow older and seek to understand the meaning of the life we’ve led.
There are logistical challenges, too, that accompany the assessment of legacy. Over the years, we accumulate personal papers and mementos. When it is time to downsize—or, at the very least, declutter—what do we do with the photographs, letters, and clippings we have accumulated?
There are many ways to preserve your legacy. We pass on our values to the generations that come after us by sharing experiences, telling stories, writing letters, creating ethical wills. Many of us save pictures, memorabilia, correspondence, and other personal items with future generations (or, in some cases, researchers) in mind, but often what we have saved ends up in our attics or basements, disorganized, inaccessible, and unprotected from environmental threats.
Doing Justice to Our Lives
Tackling your personal papers can be emotionally fraught and physically tiring work. But it is also an opportunity to take stock of and celebrate your accomplishments. The task is particularly important for women, who are often the caretakers of family history and yet tend to minimize their own achievements and the importance of their role in the family and community. At the Jewish Women’s Archive (www.jwa.org), we believe deeply that every person has a story and every story matters, contributing its unique colors to the Jewish tapestry.
As JOFA founder Blu Greenberg wrote, reflecting on archiving her personal papers at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, “Women in general do not properly value their time and work. The message of the Jewish Women’s Archive and the Schlesinger is that we must save selectively, with posterity in mind. … An adult life that doesn’t have the equivalent of three inches of a file cabinet or carton per year does not do justice to itself.” In twenty-first-century terms, doing justice to your life might mean filling a thumb drive with your personal records every year or two.
Who Am I Saving For?
The first step in organizing your papers is to define your goal. Are you saving primarily for your children and grandchildren? Do you want to preserve the history of a small organization with which you have been involved over the years? Do you want your experiences to be available to historians who will one day want to understand the lives of American Jewish women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries?
If you would like your papers to be preserved in an archive, consider which one(s) might be appropriate. Local or state historical societies, Jewish or secular, are increasingly interested in acquiring material from the recent past. Colleges and universities often collect the papers of their alumnae and faculty; many professional organizations archive the records of their members.
How do we measure the worth of a life?
If you want to keep your papers in the family, you should still make sure to follow archival standards for preservation so that your materials do not fade or decompose. If you have photographs, you might want to have them scanned so that you can make multiple copies without a loss of quality. Include as much information (names, dates, locations) in the scanned files as you can. (See the sidebar on the next page for preservation tips from the Jewish Women’s Archive.)
Where Do I Begin?
Begin at the place that feels least overwhelming— maybe by organizing your desk or home office or by making a digital copy of your yearly calendars (which contain a great deal of information about your daily life). Don’t forget digital files, if you have them. Get into the habit of creating folders on your hard drive and backing them up regularly. Whether you are using manila folders or virtual ones, be sure to label them clearly.
If the primary impetus to your organizing project is that you are, or will soon be, short of space, you might want to consider professional storage. It is relatively inexpensive to store a few file boxes; your descendants will be glad you did.
If you’re the keeper of family stories—or even just stories from your own life—write them down. Memory is not a very reliable archival system! Don’t worry about literary style. You can revise later, but if you wait until you have the time to produce elegant, polished prose, you may never get around to it. You might try putting your words in a letter to a loved one; you don’t have to send it.
What Do I Get Out of It?
Legacy isn’t important only for the future. Organizing your papers can also provide an opportunity to look back at your life and see your experiences in a larger context and with new perspective. As you go through the files of yesteryear, you may rediscover experiences or friendships you thought you would never forget, or gain new awareness of your place in larger historical trends or movements. You may feel an emerging sense of pride as you realize the value of things no auction house would bother with.
Blu Greenberg described the changes in her own perspective in this way: “I had long known that conferences, lectures, and organizations were a large part of my life, but the boxes offered scale: several conferences, a score of lectures, and dozens of meetings each year, for forty years. Seeing it all together, I reflected on how significant these conferences and organizations were in shaping my thought, how vital in making change in the world, and how precious to me in creating personal friendships that I continue to savor. My mother was wrong: all those meetings and ‘running around’ were not a waste of my time.”
Most of us have not made the public impact of leaders such as Blu, but the daily business of our lives nevertheless adds up to more than just “running around.” Revisiting our journeys—whether they took us around the world or around the block—is a valuable exercise for ourselves and our descendants.
Thinking Ahead
You might think that in this digital age, archiving is easy and automatic. Many of our personal materials are “born digital” and already saved on a computer, and we likely have access to a scanner. But even digital records require organizing, labeling, and thoughtful preservation in a backup system. And we now suffer from an embarrassment of riches—so many photos and emails that it is not clear what to save. Regular culling through the year’s photos and messages is a useful habit to cultivate.
Our habituation to digital records, which are not tangible in the same way as “hard copies,” makes the paper records all the more meaningful. In the age of twoline emails, a long letter in a grandparent’s handwriting is a special treasure. You have the power to give the gift of history to your family. If not now, when?