On Keeping A Record

What did it mean for me to take the bins? The ones I was so adamant about, at bare minimum, organizing to a state better than what they were given to us in. Through archiving these two full storage bins of photographs, film, and ephemera from about 100 years of family history, I’ve been able to parse out the three trees of immediate family around me in the forest of an extended family I don’t really know.

The process has been a deep dive into personal family history that has required me to reckon with my own place in a lineage I’ve never really participated in “correctly”. Seeing the seeds of the past sown, and tracing them back to the present has resulted in much reflection, but ultimately a record of the past cannot alone alter the present or the future, it’s just that: a record.