alt Hacker NewsI understand there may be an emotional desire to get rid of something unpleasant, but some descendants e.g. 5 generations down the line may feel very differently about this. Given how easy scanning is these days (there are literally companies that will do it for you if you send them a box), and given how good the technology for sifting through mountains of text is becoming, and given that it's literally irreplaceable text, I can't imagine doing this to family records that one of my ancestors specifically wanted to be preserved. Not criticizing your personal decision of course, but just offering a different perspective, i.e. for me it would be unimaginable to do this.
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No, the dead can't exert such influence from the grave. You're dead. It's the next generation's turn. If you were the kind of person whose diary the kids or grandkids want to see thrown in the trash, then that's how it is. You had your time on the face of the earth, you don't get to haunt the descendants. You got erased, that's it. Or your story gets retold in filtered ways in the fog of the past.
Im perfectly content knowing just vague information about individual ancestors 3-4 levels up, and basically nothing on level 5, except the odd church record of births, marriages and deaths giving a rough indication of where some of them lived.
The people 5 generations back deserve much less thought space than the community you cultivate around yourself today (including living family).
I agree. When my mother died I got access to her emails, diaries etc. I read some and as you would expect there are a whole range of emotions and opinions in there, many of which I did not care to engage with. So I asked my wife to read some and she said said she thought it was worth keeping so we do. I will not read it, but perhaps someone else will get some value from it someday. It's no effort to keep (no boxes or terabytes of data).
I feel the same way, but I think my feelings may change if I didn't actually think the person was a good enough person that deserves to have their writing immortalized, like in this case. Of course, we only have his side, but the GP doesn't seem to think his dad was a good person and wrote some hurtful things in the diary about someone they cared about, which I feel as though is justification for their actions.
I totally understand your way of thinking but there's just so much _stuff_, we already kept most of his paintings which takes up a lot of my limited storage space (I do appreciate them though, but it's possible to have conflicted feelings).
It would cost around $3000 to have the diaries scanned today, this number was way higher a few years ago (which my mother didn't have). I know Americans have a lot more storage space in their houses and use storage facilities for a lot of things but there has to be a cutoff point. I have about 6m3 of (already filled) extra storage space in central Stockholm and wouldn't want that much more. Throwing shit away is a part of life.