What to do with boxes of old family photos?

Should I take a trip to the tip?

Aug 06, 2024

I have acquired the role of archivist in our family. I’m the one among my siblings who has ended-up with boxes of things kept by the previous generation or three. What do I do with it all? Letters, documents, photographs?

One of my favourite photos is this one, from 1921 or so. The young woman holding the puppy looking straight at the camera is my Great Aunt Agnes.

I have two dozen letters from my Grandad (Ernie) to my Grandma (Constance) from 1926 when they were engaged but apart (Ernie in Stoke, Connie in London). My Dad gave them to me, and it crossed my mind that they might be racey, or poetic, or evocative, or perhaps full of insight into the current affairs of that era (the year of the General Strike). But they turned out not to be at all racey, or, truth be told, interesting. I’d describe them as “sweet”, though, definitely.

My Grandad was working in a bank. His letters are formal, constrained, and always full of arrangements to confirm. On 5th December 1926 he writes “Shall you meet me at Euston because the train is not until 9:30 and will be late for sure? I shall love you to, of course, but I don’t want you to be messed about and get cold because it’s rather late isn’t it?”.

I like that even a hundred years ago you’d do well to factor-in that a train could well be late arriving at Euston. A few days later he wrote again, presumably having got word that Connie would be there to meet him; “I’ve a new overcoat; I tell you this so that you won’t look for the old disreputable me at Euston”.

I also have so much of my Dad’s stuff, so much. He moved into a care home over two years ago. Before the boxes came to me, my sister kindly put stuff like car manuals, and holiday brochures, in recycling. The photos are a boon though. Most weeks I scan some to take and show him. If they’re photos of him with school pals from 1950, he always remembers their names even though he can never remember what he had for lunch yesterday.

My Mum died in 1985. I have three or four dozen letters she sent to me after I left home. They're chatty; the cricket got rained off, the dog is ill, the man next door has brought a new Rover. That I appreciate these letters from my Mum points to something I’d missed when I judged Ernie’s letters to Connie disappointing; it’s not so much the subjects of such letters that matter, it’s all about the reaching-out, the furthering and nourishing of a relationship.

Anyway, in addition to that photo from 1921 of her, a horse, and her girl crew, I have several hundred more photographs of my Great Aunt Agnes and her husband Eddie, some of them kept in this chocolate box. Up until now I didn’t know there were makers of luxury chocolates operating in Hull in the middle of the last century. Also I still don’t know if the Agnes and Eddie material is the the most or the least precious part of the archive.

Agnes was my Dad’s aunt; his mother Connie’s sister. In 1941 she married George Edwin “Eddie” Bilton - six years older than her - after a long engagement, and they lived up in Hull. I don’t think I had more than three or four conversations with my Great Aunt Agnes, and they would have been fleeting, and I’ve forgotten them all. We saw my Grandparents a lot, but I don’t recall Agnes and Eddie ever at our family house, but I do remember meeting-up with them once in Beverley, and visiting the Minster. Eddie told my sister to stop chewing gum in the church. This telling-off is more-or-less all that my siblings and I remember of the two of them.

Agnes and Eddie had no children, nor did my Dad’s sister (Agnes’s niece). I am not sure about Eddie’s relatives; my memory is that he had maybe three siblings, and definitely had at least one niece, and probably a nephew or two. At least one of his siblings emigrated to Australia. That their descendants are so few in number is the reason I have the bag of stuff from them; all the photos, their wills, and a postcard or two.

Agnes’s early life is well represented in the stack of photos. There are a handful taken on the same day as the horse photo, which was when she was living with her parents in Chiswick, London. On this one she’s on the far left. The names of the gang of girlfriends are pencilled on the back of the picture – next to Agnes is Vi, then Doris (with a puppy), Micky, and Fleur at the end. The fella holding the dog is described in Agnes’s pencilled note as “old man”, although for all I know he could have been in his mid-thirties. They’re sitting on a cart, so I guess he’s on his rounds delivering coal or beer barrels or something.

On the photo from that day reproduced at the beginning - the one that includes the cart horse - the girl on the horse is Nora.

Those two photos, everyday and spontaneous, are very different to almost all the other pictures in the bags and boxes. Not just Agnes and Eddie’s collection but almost all the photos I’ve got from previous generations are formal, and/or marking a special occasion or some kind of do; weddings and holidays, especially. The idea of taking a photograph of their dinner just didn’t seem to strike the pre-Instagram generations. In some ways it’s a shame. But in other ways, endless photos of liver and onions, or pork chops, boiled potatoes, carrots, and gravy, would test my enthusiasm for social history.

There’s a photo of Agnes when she was a bridesmaid at my Grandparent’s wedding (in 1927), carrying a lovely bouquet. Agnes lived through most of the 1930s as a single woman. I’m not exactly sure when she met Eddie, but it was likely to have been in Hull, just before the Second World War started. Agnes was a clerk at the Employment Exchange, and Eddie, from 1937, worked on the inspection line at the Hawker Siddeley factory in Brough, near Hull.

When they married in 1941, Agnes was thirty-five years old. Agnes and Eddie on their wedding day are pictured with various kids, possibly the full complement of nephews and nieces. My Dad is in the photo – far right, back row, in a tie. And his sister Pauline is the tall girl on Eddie’s right.

Agnes holidayed in the UK, both before and after she married. There’s a group shot from Scotland. Going by the fashions, I’m thinking maybe 1929/30.

Aside from the chewing gum incident, my strongest memory of Eddie was that he was a real snazzy dresser. Even in the years of rationing, he kept himself in good suits. I used to have feeling some of the suits were a bit too good. I fancied he was like some character in Brighton Rock, who might open his jacket and reveal a collection of smart watches and a fancy silver-plated Swiss army knife. My imagination is maybe a bit out of control at this point, but that can happen when you’re trying to fill an information vacuum.

Eddie didn’t fight in the Second World War. He was a flying cadet in the very last months of the First World War, and later served as a wireless operator in the merchant navy before taking the job at Hawker Siddeley.

He retired in 1965, and was presented with a portable typewriter to mark his twenty-eight years of service. I don’t know whether this was useful to him or not; there’s nothing typewritten by him in the big bag of archive material. I fancy he might have been the kind of fella to write to the local paper on occasions though, perhaps to complain about dogs fouling the footpath.

Elsie died in 1994, seven or eight years after Eddie and four after her big sister, my Grandmother. I have a copy of her will; looking at it now, it appears all her jewellery went to my sister. I might have a conversation with her about this.

In his will Eddie left all his clothes to the Salvation Army. There were probably some most excellent suits included in the hoard.

Their worldly possessions amounted to the jewellery, and the suits scattered around the East Riding - and this cache of documents, letters and photos, given to my Dad and now in my possession. As I say, Agnes and Eddie hardly figured in my life. Added to which, there are dozens of photos of Agnes and Eddie with people I don’t know and I’d never be able to identify even if I spent the rest of my life searching for clues. But there’s no-one with a stronger link who might want to look after them. So I am the custodian.

I’m looking after bags and bags and boxes galore from my parents and grandparents. This seems fair, and periodically I dig into them and pull out a letter or a wedding album, or some other beauty which connects me to them, and rekindles memories of all kinds. I’m so pleased to have them. The photos and the memories. Which I can share with my kids.

Curiously, though, I feel extra responsibility to look after this one bag of Agnes and Eddie’s stuff. You might conclude that there isn’t anyone in the world who’d miss the bag if I rid myself of it, which is probably true. But also, it’s unlikely but possible, that someone out there might one day find what I have is the final piece in the jigsaw of their family research. I wouldn’t keep them just on that off-chance though.

I’ll hold onto the bag because whether or not anyone will ever want to see the photos, I can’t bring myself to be the one to erase Agnes and Eddie. Without the bag, nothing’s left. No evidence of lives lived, holidays, happy days. No-one to acknowledge Eddie’s dress sense, or take pleasure in the strong bonds between Agnes and her girlfriends. If the bag goes to the tip, that’s it. All over.

What to do with boxes of old family photos?

Should I take a trip to the tip?

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