by Kate Penney Howard, Contributor

Editor's Note: Kate Penney Howard, Genetic Genealogist & Speaker, presented her topic, "Women's Hidden Histories in Early America" for our March 2026 educational program. She has written this practical step-by-step guide to organizing your family treasures that will help with an often daunting task. Visit her website, katepenneyhoward.com, for more valuable family research information.

Last week, my friend sent me this email: "My grandmother died. My mother is moving out of the house. The basement is threatening to flood, what do I do with these 12 tubs?"

Here's what I told her: "You don't have to sort anything in the first week. Grief and decision fatigue are a poor combination."

First, move the boxes to the driest, coolest room in your house. A spare bedroom closet is usually best. Then, give yourself a break, spend time with family, and grieve.

Second, triage before you organize. When you start, your goal is not to sort by family line or chronology. Your goal is to separate the fragile from the stable, and the original from the copy. Photographs are fragile. Loose newspaper clippings are fragile. Nineteenth century letters are fragile. Modern printed pages are not. Twentieth century photocopies are not. Stack the fragile items separately and handle them as little as possible. My friend who runs a digitizing company calls these things the "fish heads" - the things that gum up the works in a fast loose-leaf scanner.

Third, get the basics right on storage. Archival boxes cost about what a pizza costs, and they'll outlast you. They are buffered, acid-free, and lignin-free. You want acid-free tissue paper between photographs. You want polypropylene or polyethylene sleeves for documents, not PVC, which off-gasses and yellows. Write on the box, not on the item. If you must label an item, use a soft graphite pencil on the reverse margin.

Fourth, digitize the irreplaceable first. A flatbed scanner at 600 dpi for photographs and 400 dpi for documents produces files useful for preservation and for everyday reference. Save the master file as a TIFF if you can manage the file size. Save a working copy as JPEG. Name files consistently: surname-firstname-documenttype-date. Back up to two locations, one of them offsite. A single hard drive in your office is not a backup plan. It's a waiting disaster.

Fifth, label what you know now. Old photographs lose their identifications every generation. The cousin who knew everyone in the 1952 reunion picture dies, and then no one knows anyone. Sit down with the oldest person in the family and a stack of unidentified photographs and a voice recorder. Ask open questions. "Who is this?" "When was this?" The recorder catches the asides and half-memories the written label would miss.

Sixth, decide what to keep in the original and what to keep in the file. Not every document has to stay as a physical artifact. A 1998 printout of a Social Security application is a file, not a treasure. A handwritten recipe card from your grandmother is both a document and an object. It holds her handwriting, her smudges, her pencil corrections. Keep the originals of handwritten materials, photographs, legal documents, and anything with a signature. Scan the rest and let the paper go.

Seventh, share as you go. The family archive is not a vault. It's a library. If you've transcribed your great-grandfather's Civil War letters, post them to a family tree, a blog, FamilySearch Memories, or WikiTree. If you've indexed the Sunday school attendance register your great-grandmother kept for thirty years, offer it to the relevant county historical society. Archives live when they are used. They die when they are hoarded.

Spring is a good time for this work because the light is better. You'll see tears and foxing you missed in winter light. You'll catch pencil notations that are nearly invisible under lamps. Open the curtains. Put on something warm. Make tea. The boxes have waited this long, they'll wait another afternoon while you catch your breath.