9 ms·

A queasy selling of the family heirlooms

111 points by ilamont 1y ago

esafak 1y ago
It's because life moves faster now. My wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do. I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things. Time to make myself another cup.
- panzagl 1y ago
  Also, just use the stuff- anything besides silver has almost no resale value so you might as well use it, put it in the dishwasher, use them as skeet, whatever.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    And what has value changes. Unless it is something really special or rare, trends do change over time. And this applies to everything.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Yeah. I have my parents' wedding china which I don't use on a daily basis. (Would rather use stoneware than china.) But had a bunch of people over, I was like, heck I have this whole cabinet full of dishes. Why not use them?
- foobarian 1y ago
  I think we evolved to hoard stuff while stuff was really hard to come by. But the industrial evolution and especially last century messed up all of that by throwing a glut of near free objects at us and many of us are just not that good at dealing with it.
  - cjs_ac 1y ago
    My grandfather had a hoarding tendency as a consequence of growing up in the Great Depression. As a response to this, my father has a tendency to be too eager to throw things away. As a response to this, I have a hoarding tendency.
    - fn-mote 1y ago
      > too eager to throw things away Curious about this. Does it mean he is throwing away things with sentimental value? Just wanted to probe the idea of a self-proclaimed hoarder evaluating someone else’s tendency as “too eager”… by asking how you know.
      - pjc50 1y ago
        My own family moved a couple of notches on the hoarder/junker scale after a few incidents of discovering that a document had been thrown away that turned out to be important.
        ghaff 1y ago
        There's no hard line. But there are some types of documents I've tossed in the fire box and other documents I put in a pile and figure after a year or two they probably don't matter.
    - _dain_ 1y ago
      Sounds like the anorexia-bulimia axis but for possessions instead of food
  - adrianmonk 1y ago
    I attribute some of it to the Great Depression. My grandparents grew up during it, and it had an effect on them. They never wanted to get rid of anything because what if times got really hard again? You might be so poor that you couldn't reacquire what you got rid of. They lived a comfortable middle class life, and that fear never materialized. But they were still prepared in case it did. And they passed that kind of thinking on to the next generation.
- munificent 1y ago
  > It's because life moves faster now. In a little more detail, I think that previous generations were time-rich and stuff-poor. Objects were laborious to make so people had few of them but also more time on their hands. That meant it was reasonable to obligate someone to spend a little time keeping and maintaining an object even if you weren't likely to use it often. But now thanks to automation, globalization, and other stuff, physical objects are cheap. And thanks to an infinite number of media services who want to vacuum up every moment of our attention, time is costly. So objects come and go in our lives because it's not worth spending any time holding on to a thing you could just buy again when you need it later. While I certainly take advantage of the convenience of cheap stuff, I don't think our current situation is really healthier.
- tasuki 1y ago
  > ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do. I try not to collect things. But I noticed I have an increasing number of gaiwans. Somehow, I always find an excuse to acquire another one... (Them gaiwans are of the "I won't be too sad if the kid breaks one" variety. Props to the kid for not having broken any yet, despite regularly enjoying a variety of oolongs/pu-erhs/greens...)
pfdietz 1y ago
Since silver is important in making the front contacts of solar cells, sell that old unused silverware blackening in the drawer and help replace fossil fuels. Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.
- acheron 1y ago
  Beep boop, human feelings are illogical.
  - wakawaka28 1y ago
    The funny thing is that the "logical argument" is also emotional. "Your silver is tarnishing because you don't need or even want it" and "don't you care about the climate, we need solar panels to be 0.1% cheaper" are playing with emotions.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Most individual people can only hope to make a minuscule difference for the climate. I don’t think it’s really irrational to try to make that 0.1% difference, just a recognition of our limitations.
      - wakawaka28 1y ago
        I think 0.1% is an exaggeration, and the price drop would be even less. The amount of silver even in all the silverware put together is dwarfed by other uses, even investment (which is stacking it in a vault for future use). The point is that depriving yourself of sentimental objects just because you imagine some green outcome is silly. The absolute most environmentally friendly use for the silverware is to put it in the hands of someone who WANTS silverware, because of the substantial costs required to make it in the first place PLUS the costs of remanufacturing it into other objects (which you also have to assume in the transfer to your proposed use).
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  The impact of everyone selling their silverware on solar panel prices (and probably even bullion prices) would be so miniscule that it doesn't even matter. So don't destroy your culturally significant artifacts because of such absurd hypotheticals as "I'm making the world a better place by doing this"...
shrubble 1y ago
Silver is anti microbial; eating on silver may well be very beneficial.
- chasil 1y ago
  Copper has the same effect. Brass tableware would be the least expensive material for this purpose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect
  - arresin 1y ago
    Brass will leach lead into food. I would not be shocked if old Stirling didn’t either.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  Harmful microbes being on our plates rather than within the food we eat is not a common vector of disease, unless you tend to reuse your plates without washing them in between. In the latter case, there's a much less expensive option available to improve your health instead of buying silver plates...
- nradov 1y ago
  Not all bacteria are harmful. Most of us would probably be better off consuming a wider variety of it.
- pjc50 1y ago
  It is however an absolute pain to keep clean.
comrade1234 1y ago
I inherited a family cabin. It's nice - I'm there right now. Rural WI, fiber connection, fireplace, on a lake, etc but god does it suck up the money. I'm looking forward to giving it to someone in the next generation but I have to wait until one of them has a job that can afford the upkeep.
- rendall 1y ago
  What is expensive about its upkeep?
  - comrade1234 1y ago
    In the last ten years: - roof replacement (replaced with metal so hopefully a longer-lived roof) - repaint and repair cabin, garage, shed - replace rotting deck - had to dig out a creek to replace a culvert and did proper landscaping as part of it - redo a big part of the landscaping to redirect water runoff away from the cabin while also installing drain tile - re-level the cabin and a shed where the ground had settled - converted from gas to all-electric (it's only a summer cabin so no need for gas) and so had to upgrade the electric connection (this change wasn't completely necessary but I just didn't like using gas) - replace the pump Coming up: - convert kitchen lighting to led from halogen tubes (ballasts are failing so may as well redo it all) - repair/replace parts of the fireplace outside because it was built with indoor bricks instead of outdoor so it's breaking apart That's just off the top of my head... I have a list of projects but I'm not getting out of my chair to get it :)
    - DougN7 1y ago
      It sounds like many of these are going to have long lasting effects. That person that inherits from you will wonder why you thought it was so expensive. Good job :)
    - fwipsy 1y ago
      To be fair, many of these are upgrades, not just repairs. Sounds like a lovely property though.
  - 1y ago
mikewarot 1y ago
It could be worse, you could have spent money to store a bunch of furniture or other things you'll never use for a decade, out of a sense of obligation to someone who isn't around anymore to tell you how stupid you're being, and just get rid of it.
renewiltord 1y ago
I come from poverty relative to the United States and never want to let go of things, electronics having been the hardest to acquire in my childhood. My wife comes from being middle-class America and correctly perceives these fast outdated things as pure carrying cost, worthless in the near future. A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility. Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
bee_rider 1y ago
We should think of mementos as going through a distillation process or something. For the original owner, the set exists as a reminder of their whole younger life—throwing parties with overcomplicated settings and finally getting into the middle class. For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces. These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.
- cranky908canuck 1y ago
  >> But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. That's a lovely thought!
s1mon 1y ago
Having gone through this exercise recently, silver is typically only valuable if it’s not plated and then only for the metal. Unless you have some really special pattern that someone else wants, it will be melted down for other uses. Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.
- dgacmu 1y ago
  And - having also gone through it - there are legitimate lead concerns with old china. I sold my family's mostly for that reason. Kept the silver for emotional reasons but still haven't used it yet. Probably a sign there.
  - analog31 1y ago
    Not to mention uranium. ;-) I've got the Fiesta Ware bowl that my mom kept along with her Geiger counter, until she moved from her house to a small apartment.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    And other pottery. My parent brought back literally suitcases full of glazed pottery from Mexico when they had a house there. I've disposed of most of it.
cannonpr 1y ago
I am from a European country with a long… very long history, some of the family heirlooms date back to Byzantium. I don’t live in that country anymore, and I live in terror of inheriting them… I could give them to a museum, yet asides from that feeling like a betrayal, I know it will mostly just sit in a box till it rots away. Maybe making it out to an exhibit once per 30 years. I feel like we are all losing interest in our past.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Don't many museums accept items on loan? Which is to say, they'll display them for an agreed upon time and return them rather than claim ownership?
  - cranky908canuck 1y ago
    That doesn't solve the problem of where to put it in the long term.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      Ostensibly, you could keep loaning them out...
    - adastra22 1y ago
      If the item is truly antique and display worthy, it can be accepted in “permanent loan.” Most of the art you see in museums is technically on permanent loan.
- yulker 1y ago
  How much of it can you mount on a wall? Wall mounted artifacts and art require trivial maintenance effort and don't clutter up the floor, while honoring those objects and making them visible and enjoyable.
- FiatLuxDave 1y ago
  This is the comment on here I most relate to myself. I'm also from a family with old roots, although our family heirlooms date back only to the Fourth Crusade at earliest. My mother passed away a few years ago, and I was made responsible for an awful lot of items that people would generally be surprised to find outside of a museum. So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one. But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true. I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history. So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other. One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
I'm reminded of Swedish death cleaning [1]. If I don't die outright, I'll try to do as much for my daughters. When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.) Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought. The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste. A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years. This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay. I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma. Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning
- ghaff 1y ago
  I had a kitchen fire in the middle of the night during the winter and I'm really trying to simplify things as I get set back up. Direct damage was fairly constrained to kitchen but the whole house was cleared out for cleaning due to smoke. I'm being pretty selective with what fiddly heirloom things I put back on walls in particular and have generally dumped a lot of stuff which I had out because I had it. It's hard. I have/had some things I really like and/or are useful. But although I have a fair bit of storage space in my house, I'm taking a really close look at what will ever emerge from the box it's stored in.
- midwaste 1y ago
WalterBright 1y ago
Jerry Seinfeld, on the life of things we buy: 1. buy treadmill from Amazon with one click, delivered to your door 2. put it in the living room corner 3. after a while, put it in the garage 4. more time passes, move it to the storage unit 5. take it to the dump Amazon could do us all a favor, and have one-click send it directly to the dump.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  Sadly, this also matches my impression of the quality level of treadmills sold on Amazon. They are cheap and optimised for easy transport rather than usability.
paulpauper 1y ago
family Heirlooms are basically junk as far as resell goes. many are surprised to learn grandma's cutlery or trinkets isn't worth the price paid to apprise it. This goes for collectables in general. People think that if their collectables maybe go up that they made a good deal, but they would have been way better off putting the money in the S&P 500.
klondike_klive 1y ago
This article came at a very apposite time for me, I inherited a lot of family heirlooms and have spent the last three years avoiding doing anything with them, not knowing much about where they came from or why I ended up with them. A lot of glassware and silver plate, some crockery, lamps etc. In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it. I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them. If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.
- voidfunc 1y ago
  If it makes you feel any better the hand written note is perhaps the real memento. Its got your grandmother's writing and thoughts on it. A real window to a deceased loved ones thoughts. The stuff? Just materials passing through time and space.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    This is also a reminder that if you want anyone to even PRETEND to care about your junk, give it away whilst alive! At least then they have to find it and display it when you visit out of fear of being dewilled.
zippyman55 1y ago
Heirlooms are one thing but collections of mass produced items are a real drain on children to dispose of. We are working thru my mother in laws storage locker, 30+ yrs in storage, currently $5000/yr. The locker was 10x10 and 100 percent stuffed. To get work room, we rented three lockers to sort the material. We now have one locker with 20 antique clocks, one locker full of porcilin lladros, and another one with furniture. And the original locker is still a challenge. So much of this should never have been acquired. And I still have my parents wedding silverware, 1958, still in the original wrappers.
- ghaff 1y ago
  A couple of events recently convinced me to never have a storage locker (though it could also be a packed garage) without some sort of exit plan. A storage locker because you're in the process of moving or need some space for outdoor gear because you live in an apartment? Fine. A storage locker because you have too much stuff and have no real plans to buy a second home or move somewhere bigger? Not so fine.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    The cost of these places also is pretty substantial. Really should consider what is the value of stored items if replaced with new, compared to storage cost. Especially with furniture like say beds or sofas. But why not everything else. Does it really make sense to store. And do you actually want to reuse it. Especially if it is say some particle board and not full wood.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      It's often a form of kicking the can down the road. As you write, not cheap, but easier than sorting and making decisions. But you're often just making it someone else's problem.
  - munificent 1y ago
    I held this same belief for many years, but now find myself the renter of an interminable storage unit. Its contents are almost entirely: * Boxes for various bits of electronic gear that I may sell at some point and will net a better value if I have the original packaging. This has proven worthwhile in the past as I explored my synth hobby. * Halloween and Christmas decorations, because my wife decorates for the holidays like an exuberant goth Clark Griswald. The unit is 90% the latter. I've thought long and hard that we shouldn't own more than we can hold on our property. I've even thought that maybe we should move into a bigger house with more storage in order to achieve that goal. But then I realized that a storage unit is essentially a much cheaper version of that second sentence. Here in Seattle, uprgading to an even slightly bigger house would be an enormous increase in our mortgage, would incur a large costly move, and risks having to change schools for my kids. Compared to that, a storage unit is a much cheaper, easier option. I would still prefer to not have it, and I'm enough of a minimalist that I could get by fine without it. But marriage is a partnership and those decorations bring her (and the rest of our neighborhood) a lot of joy, so here we are.
jchallis 1y ago
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill. Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it: 1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters. 2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want. 3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them. 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle. This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
- ghaff 1y ago
  And "Sell on Ebay" is easy advice but, if you're not an antiques dealer, pretty uninteresting and impractical. The fact that there mostly aren't 50 cents on the dollar third-party Ebay sellers any longer should probably be a hint that it isn't a good business--and probably less so than it once was.
  - joshlemer 1y ago
    Why's that? What has changed that makes selling nicknacks on Ebay less worth it?
    - ghaff 1y ago
      I never found selling cheapish knicknacks on Ebay very attractive financially but it seems like it's less of Ebay's business these days and just not something I'm willing to devote a lot of time and energy to. More generally, I do think it used to be more of a flea market even if I never found it a great selling platform for cheap items.
    - 1y ago
nineplay 1y ago
My ILs have traveled the world and have a home full of things they've purchased and loved. My FIL's parents passed away about 15 years ago. It took my FIL years to go through all that stuff and figure out what to do with it. They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests. I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.
metalman 1y ago
8500+ ft² Victorian, with every last thing to fill it in style, and every last thing that was purchased along the way, functional, identifiable, or niether, objects going back generations, 2~300 lbs of photos and negatives 2500 + books, very large furniture,and mountains of pure junk in a never emptyied out in 165 years attic.12 or more full pickup loads to the dump, and 3 or 4 to the local hospital donation, thrift store. Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.
rr808 1y ago
No mention of size of houses either. I have great grandparents who had farms, parents with big 4 bed houses who have now passed. Meanwhile I'm in a two bedroom with kids. Not much room for that grand piano, antiques & book collections.
- nradov 1y ago
  That may be an issue in some HCOL areas, but the average size of new houses has been steadily increasing for decades. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...
CoffeeOnWrite 1y ago
Sigh, sorry to the author that your mom wasn’t into mid-century design.
dzuc 1y ago
A similar piece with an opposite take away: https://thespectator.com/life/home-for-the-holidays-rediscover-romance-objects/ https://thespectator.com/life/home-for-the-holidays-rediscov... (https://archive.is/uBQMW https://archive.is/uBQMW)
jandrewrogers 1y ago
This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash. A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
siliconc0w 1y ago
When we bought our house, we offered to buy it as-is so the owners wouldn't have to sort through it. This may have helped our bid win even if it wasn't the highest. It was actually pretty interesting looking through the lives of the previous owners. I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.
burnermore 1y ago
Very interesting read. As someone who inherited the ancestors house which is 90+ years old, its really a fascinating read. I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it. But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix. So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse). My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new. Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself? Interesting read! Thank you.

111 points by ilamont 1y ago

It's because life moves faster now. My wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do. I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things. Time to make myself another cup.

panzagl 1y ago
Also, just use the stuff- anything besides silver has almost no resale value so you might as well use it, put it in the dishwasher, use them as skeet, whatever.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  And what has value changes. Unless it is something really special or rare, trends do change over time. And this applies to everything.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Yeah. I have my parents' wedding china which I don't use on a daily basis. (Would rather use stoneware than china.) But had a bunch of people over, I was like, heck I have this whole cabinet full of dishes. Why not use them?
foobarian 1y ago
I think we evolved to hoard stuff while stuff was really hard to come by. But the industrial evolution and especially last century messed up all of that by throwing a glut of near free objects at us and many of us are just not that good at dealing with it.
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  My grandfather had a hoarding tendency as a consequence of growing up in the Great Depression. As a response to this, my father has a tendency to be too eager to throw things away. As a response to this, I have a hoarding tendency.
  - fn-mote 1y ago
    > too eager to throw things away Curious about this. Does it mean he is throwing away things with sentimental value? Just wanted to probe the idea of a self-proclaimed hoarder evaluating someone else’s tendency as “too eager”… by asking how you know.
    - pjc50 1y ago
      My own family moved a couple of notches on the hoarder/junker scale after a few incidents of discovering that a document had been thrown away that turned out to be important.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        There's no hard line. But there are some types of documents I've tossed in the fire box and other documents I put in a pile and figure after a year or two they probably don't matter.
  - _dain_ 1y ago
    Sounds like the anorexia-bulimia axis but for possessions instead of food
- adrianmonk 1y ago
  I attribute some of it to the Great Depression. My grandparents grew up during it, and it had an effect on them. They never wanted to get rid of anything because what if times got really hard again? You might be so poor that you couldn't reacquire what you got rid of. They lived a comfortable middle class life, and that fear never materialized. But they were still prepared in case it did. And they passed that kind of thinking on to the next generation.
munificent 1y ago
> It's because life moves faster now. In a little more detail, I think that previous generations were time-rich and stuff-poor. Objects were laborious to make so people had few of them but also more time on their hands. That meant it was reasonable to obligate someone to spend a little time keeping and maintaining an object even if you weren't likely to use it often. But now thanks to automation, globalization, and other stuff, physical objects are cheap. And thanks to an infinite number of media services who want to vacuum up every moment of our attention, time is costly. So objects come and go in our lives because it's not worth spending any time holding on to a thing you could just buy again when you need it later. While I certainly take advantage of the convenience of cheap stuff, I don't think our current situation is really healthier.
tasuki 1y ago
> ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do. I try not to collect things. But I noticed I have an increasing number of gaiwans. Somehow, I always find an excuse to acquire another one... (Them gaiwans are of the "I won't be too sad if the kid breaks one" variety. Props to the kid for not having broken any yet, despite regularly enjoying a variety of oolongs/pu-erhs/greens...)

pfdietz 1y ago

Since silver is important in making the front contacts of solar cells, sell that old unused silverware blackening in the drawer and help replace fossil fuels. Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.

acheron 1y ago
Beep boop, human feelings are illogical.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  The funny thing is that the "logical argument" is also emotional. "Your silver is tarnishing because you don't need or even want it" and "don't you care about the climate, we need solar panels to be 0.1% cheaper" are playing with emotions.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Most individual people can only hope to make a minuscule difference for the climate. I don’t think it’s really irrational to try to make that 0.1% difference, just a recognition of our limitations.
    - wakawaka28 1y ago
      I think 0.1% is an exaggeration, and the price drop would be even less. The amount of silver even in all the silverware put together is dwarfed by other uses, even investment (which is stacking it in a vault for future use). The point is that depriving yourself of sentimental objects just because you imagine some green outcome is silly. The absolute most environmentally friendly use for the silverware is to put it in the hands of someone who WANTS silverware, because of the substantial costs required to make it in the first place PLUS the costs of remanufacturing it into other objects (which you also have to assume in the transfer to your proposed use).
wakawaka28 1y ago
The impact of everyone selling their silverware on solar panel prices (and probably even bullion prices) would be so miniscule that it doesn't even matter. So don't destroy your culturally significant artifacts because of such absurd hypotheticals as "I'm making the world a better place by doing this"...

shrubble 1y ago

Silver is anti microbial; eating on silver may well be very beneficial.

chasil 1y ago
Copper has the same effect. Brass tableware would be the least expensive material for this purpose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect
- arresin 1y ago
  Brass will leach lead into food. I would not be shocked if old Stirling didn’t either.
margalabargala 1y ago
Harmful microbes being on our plates rather than within the food we eat is not a common vector of disease, unless you tend to reuse your plates without washing them in between. In the latter case, there's a much less expensive option available to improve your health instead of buying silver plates...
nradov 1y ago
Not all bacteria are harmful. Most of us would probably be better off consuming a wider variety of it.
pjc50 1y ago
It is however an absolute pain to keep clean.

comrade1234 1y ago

I inherited a family cabin. It's nice - I'm there right now. Rural WI, fiber connection, fireplace, on a lake, etc but god does it suck up the money. I'm looking forward to giving it to someone in the next generation but I have to wait until one of them has a job that can afford the upkeep.

rendall 1y ago
What is expensive about its upkeep?
- comrade1234 1y ago
  In the last ten years: - roof replacement (replaced with metal so hopefully a longer-lived roof) - repaint and repair cabin, garage, shed - replace rotting deck - had to dig out a creek to replace a culvert and did proper landscaping as part of it - redo a big part of the landscaping to redirect water runoff away from the cabin while also installing drain tile - re-level the cabin and a shed where the ground had settled - converted from gas to all-electric (it's only a summer cabin so no need for gas) and so had to upgrade the electric connection (this change wasn't completely necessary but I just didn't like using gas) - replace the pump Coming up: - convert kitchen lighting to led from halogen tubes (ballasts are failing so may as well redo it all) - repair/replace parts of the fireplace outside because it was built with indoor bricks instead of outdoor so it's breaking apart That's just off the top of my head... I have a list of projects but I'm not getting out of my chair to get it :)
  - DougN7 1y ago
    It sounds like many of these are going to have long lasting effects. That person that inherits from you will wonder why you thought it was so expensive. Good job :)
  - fwipsy 1y ago
    To be fair, many of these are upgrades, not just repairs. Sounds like a lovely property though.
- 1y ago

mikewarot 1y ago

It could be worse, you could have spent money to store a bunch of furniture or other things you'll never use for a decade, out of a sense of obligation to someone who isn't around anymore to tell you how stupid you're being, and just get rid of it.

renewiltord 1y ago

I come from poverty relative to the United States and never want to let go of things, electronics having been the hardest to acquire in my childhood. My wife comes from being middle-class America and correctly perceives these fast outdated things as pure carrying cost, worthless in the near future. A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility. Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.

bee_rider 1y ago

We should think of mementos as going through a distillation process or something. For the original owner, the set exists as a reminder of their whole younger life—throwing parties with overcomplicated settings and finally getting into the middle class. For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces. These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.

cranky908canuck 1y ago
>> But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. That's a lovely thought!

s1mon 1y ago

Having gone through this exercise recently, silver is typically only valuable if it’s not plated and then only for the metal. Unless you have some really special pattern that someone else wants, it will be melted down for other uses. Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.

dgacmu 1y ago
And - having also gone through it - there are legitimate lead concerns with old china. I sold my family's mostly for that reason. Kept the silver for emotional reasons but still haven't used it yet. Probably a sign there.
- analog31 1y ago
  Not to mention uranium. ;-) I've got the Fiesta Ware bowl that my mom kept along with her Geiger counter, until she moved from her house to a small apartment.
- ghaff 1y ago
  And other pottery. My parent brought back literally suitcases full of glazed pottery from Mexico when they had a house there. I've disposed of most of it.

cannonpr 1y ago

I am from a European country with a long… very long history, some of the family heirlooms date back to Byzantium. I don’t live in that country anymore, and I live in terror of inheriting them… I could give them to a museum, yet asides from that feeling like a betrayal, I know it will mostly just sit in a box till it rots away. Maybe making it out to an exhibit once per 30 years. I feel like we are all losing interest in our past.

zdragnar 1y ago
Don't many museums accept items on loan? Which is to say, they'll display them for an agreed upon time and return them rather than claim ownership?
- cranky908canuck 1y ago
  That doesn't solve the problem of where to put it in the long term.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Ostensibly, you could keep loaning them out...
  - adastra22 1y ago
    If the item is truly antique and display worthy, it can be accepted in “permanent loan.” Most of the art you see in museums is technically on permanent loan.
yulker 1y ago
How much of it can you mount on a wall? Wall mounted artifacts and art require trivial maintenance effort and don't clutter up the floor, while honoring those objects and making them visible and enjoyable.
FiatLuxDave 1y ago
This is the comment on here I most relate to myself. I'm also from a family with old roots, although our family heirlooms date back only to the Fourth Crusade at earliest. My mother passed away a few years ago, and I was made responsible for an awful lot of items that people would generally be surprised to find outside of a museum. So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one. But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true. I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history. So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other. One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

I'm reminded of Swedish death cleaning [1]. If I don't die outright, I'll try to do as much for my daughters. When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.) Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought. The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste. A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years. This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay. I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma. Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning

ghaff 1y ago
I had a kitchen fire in the middle of the night during the winter and I'm really trying to simplify things as I get set back up. Direct damage was fairly constrained to kitchen but the whole house was cleared out for cleaning due to smoke. I'm being pretty selective with what fiddly heirloom things I put back on walls in particular and have generally dumped a lot of stuff which I had out because I had it. It's hard. I have/had some things I really like and/or are useful. But although I have a fair bit of storage space in my house, I'm taking a really close look at what will ever emerge from the box it's stored in.
midwaste 1y ago

WalterBright 1y ago

Jerry Seinfeld, on the life of things we buy: 1. buy treadmill from Amazon with one click, delivered to your door 2. put it in the living room corner 3. after a while, put it in the garage 4. more time passes, move it to the storage unit 5. take it to the dump Amazon could do us all a favor, and have one-click send it directly to the dump.

fxtentacle 1y ago
Sadly, this also matches my impression of the quality level of treadmills sold on Amazon. They are cheap and optimised for easy transport rather than usability.

paulpauper 1y ago

family Heirlooms are basically junk as far as resell goes. many are surprised to learn grandma's cutlery or trinkets isn't worth the price paid to apprise it. This goes for collectables in general. People think that if their collectables maybe go up that they made a good deal, but they would have been way better off putting the money in the S&P 500.

klondike_klive 1y ago

This article came at a very apposite time for me, I inherited a lot of family heirlooms and have spent the last three years avoiding doing anything with them, not knowing much about where they came from or why I ended up with them. A lot of glassware and silver plate, some crockery, lamps etc. In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it. I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them. If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.

voidfunc 1y ago
If it makes you feel any better the hand written note is perhaps the real memento. Its got your grandmother's writing and thoughts on it. A real window to a deceased loved ones thoughts. The stuff? Just materials passing through time and space.
- bombcar 1y ago
  This is also a reminder that if you want anyone to even PRETEND to care about your junk, give it away whilst alive! At least then they have to find it and display it when you visit out of fear of being dewilled.

zippyman55 1y ago

Heirlooms are one thing but collections of mass produced items are a real drain on children to dispose of. We are working thru my mother in laws storage locker, 30+ yrs in storage, currently $5000/yr. The locker was 10x10 and 100 percent stuffed. To get work room, we rented three lockers to sort the material. We now have one locker with 20 antique clocks, one locker full of porcilin lladros, and another one with furniture. And the original locker is still a challenge. So much of this should never have been acquired. And I still have my parents wedding silverware, 1958, still in the original wrappers.

ghaff 1y ago
A couple of events recently convinced me to never have a storage locker (though it could also be a packed garage) without some sort of exit plan. A storage locker because you're in the process of moving or need some space for outdoor gear because you live in an apartment? Fine. A storage locker because you have too much stuff and have no real plans to buy a second home or move somewhere bigger? Not so fine.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  The cost of these places also is pretty substantial. Really should consider what is the value of stored items if replaced with new, compared to storage cost. Especially with furniture like say beds or sofas. But why not everything else. Does it really make sense to store. And do you actually want to reuse it. Especially if it is say some particle board and not full wood.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    It's often a form of kicking the can down the road. As you write, not cheap, but easier than sorting and making decisions. But you're often just making it someone else's problem.
- munificent 1y ago
  I held this same belief for many years, but now find myself the renter of an interminable storage unit. Its contents are almost entirely: * Boxes for various bits of electronic gear that I may sell at some point and will net a better value if I have the original packaging. This has proven worthwhile in the past as I explored my synth hobby. * Halloween and Christmas decorations, because my wife decorates for the holidays like an exuberant goth Clark Griswald. The unit is 90% the latter. I've thought long and hard that we shouldn't own more than we can hold on our property. I've even thought that maybe we should move into a bigger house with more storage in order to achieve that goal. But then I realized that a storage unit is essentially a much cheaper version of that second sentence. Here in Seattle, uprgading to an even slightly bigger house would be an enormous increase in our mortgage, would incur a large costly move, and risks having to change schools for my kids. Compared to that, a storage unit is a much cheaper, easier option. I would still prefer to not have it, and I'm enough of a minimalist that I could get by fine without it. But marriage is a partnership and those decorations bring her (and the rest of our neighborhood) a lot of joy, so here we are.

jchallis 1y ago

I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill. Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it: 1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters. 2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want. 3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them. 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle. This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.

ghaff 1y ago
And "Sell on Ebay" is easy advice but, if you're not an antiques dealer, pretty uninteresting and impractical. The fact that there mostly aren't 50 cents on the dollar third-party Ebay sellers any longer should probably be a hint that it isn't a good business--and probably less so than it once was.
- joshlemer 1y ago
  Why's that? What has changed that makes selling nicknacks on Ebay less worth it?
  - ghaff 1y ago
    I never found selling cheapish knicknacks on Ebay very attractive financially but it seems like it's less of Ebay's business these days and just not something I'm willing to devote a lot of time and energy to. More generally, I do think it used to be more of a flea market even if I never found it a great selling platform for cheap items.
  - 1y ago

nineplay 1y ago

My ILs have traveled the world and have a home full of things they've purchased and loved. My FIL's parents passed away about 15 years ago. It took my FIL years to go through all that stuff and figure out what to do with it. They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests. I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.

metalman 1y ago

8500+ ft² Victorian, with every last thing to fill it in style, and every last thing that was purchased along the way, functional, identifiable, or niether, objects going back generations, 2~300 lbs of photos and negatives 2500 + books, very large furniture,and mountains of pure junk in a never emptyied out in 165 years attic.12 or more full pickup loads to the dump, and 3 or 4 to the local hospital donation, thrift store. Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.

rr808 1y ago

No mention of size of houses either. I have great grandparents who had farms, parents with big 4 bed houses who have now passed. Meanwhile I'm in a two bedroom with kids. Not much room for that grand piano, antiques & book collections.

nradov 1y ago
That may be an issue in some HCOL areas, but the average size of new houses has been steadily increasing for decades. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

CoffeeOnWrite 1y ago

Sigh, sorry to the author that your mom wasn’t into mid-century design.

dzuc 1y ago

A similar piece with an opposite take away: https://thespectator.com/life/home-for-the-holidays-rediscover-romance-objects/ https://thespectator.com/life/home-for-the-holidays-rediscov... (https://archive.is/uBQMW https://archive.is/uBQMW)

jandrewrogers 1y ago

This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash. A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.

siliconc0w 1y ago

When we bought our house, we offered to buy it as-is so the owners wouldn't have to sort through it. This may have helped our bid win even if it wasn't the highest. It was actually pretty interesting looking through the lives of the previous owners. I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.

burnermore 1y ago

Very interesting read. As someone who inherited the ancestors house which is 90+ years old, its really a fascinating read. I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it. But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix. So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse). My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new. Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself? Interesting read! Thank you.