How to store personal family items - papers, yearbooks, cards, letters, etc...

[4Marmalade]

I finally dug into an old trunk that we have (that we plan on taking apart because it's falling apart and taking up room in our bedroom).  There is a lot of history there.  My mother died 16 years ago so I ended up getting a lot of her personal history things - yearbooks, school pictures, wedding album, her medical journal, cards from her funeral, etc...  I also have some of my dad's things (certificates, etc...) as well as mine and dh's sentimental stuff from childhood and beyond.  There is not a lot of stuff and I will weed out the few things I don't want to keep but right now everything is just kind of thrown into this trunk.  I'm not sure how I should store this stuff.  It's not really stuff that we look at regularly but I do like to look at it now and then and I think it will be nice for our kids to have eventually as there really is a lot of interesting family tree type stuff in there.  I thought of rubbermaid totes but we already have so many of those for our regular stuff I wasn't sure that was the best choice.  I would like it in some sort of container that can be stored away in a room somewhere.

Ideas??

[doubledutch]

how easy of access to you want to have to it?  like, do you still want these things in your bedroom but need a different piece of furniture to hold it (like a cedar chest or storage bench/ottoman)?  do you want it in a closet?  do you want to incorporate all the loose things into a book/album you can flip through?  if you have room on a book shelf or case, you could keep the yearbooks, wedding album and a photo album / scrapbook of the other items there, so you could look through them whenever.  then you wouldn't have much to store, and it would be easy to tuck a quite small box of the other things into a closet.

[4Marmalade]

Originally Posted by doubledutch 

how easy of access to you want to have to it?  like, do you still want these things in your bedroom but need a different piece of furniture to hold it (like a cedar chest or storage bench/ottoman)?  do you want it in a closet?  do you want to incorporate all the loose things into a book/album you can flip through?  if you have room on a book shelf or case, you could keep the yearbooks, wedding album and a photo album / scrapbook of the other items there, so you could look through them whenever.  then you wouldn't have much to store, and it would be easy to tuck a quite small box of the other things into a closet.

I want them tucked away out of sight.  We are 6 people in this house and all available space is pretty much used up.  I don't have time to sort things right now although I can dream of the day I actually make time to put things in order, make albums, etc...  I guess some kind of tote would work - I just didn't know if I should or could be storing them in something different.

[beanma]

If you wanted to get something a little nicer you could get an archival photo box or a larger archival box.

We have a ton of stuff for our family archives. My mom was a saver and her mom was a saver and it goes back many more generations. I could practically open up a museum. My mom had all of it at her house up until two weeks ago when she moved into a retirement community. Now I don't know what to do with it all! I mean we have my grandmother's grandmother's bonnet. This would be like 1850s or so. Can't just throw that away, y'know, but what the he!! do you do with it!!?! On my dad's side we found a Confederate $50 bill with Jefferson Davis on it and everything. Crazy!