Sorting files
26/11/23 01:00
I come from a long line of people who kept paper. They kept paper in files and boxes and cabinets. They saved newspaper clippings and programs from special events and notebooks. They wrote journals and on typewriters. It should come as no surprise to me that I have a digital file of journal entries that now includes over 5,000 essays. But there is a big difference between my journals and those of my forebears. I am not keeping paper copies. At least the digital files all fit on a solid state digital drive that smaller than a cell phone. They also exist online where it is difficult to compute the physical space involved. I keep thinking that I need to invest some time organizing and indexing all of those journal entries so that others could sort through them. Right now, the main organizing feature is date. You can pick any date between 2007 and today and find my journal entry for that date through the archives in this web site. And for some of those years, there are files that contain an entire year in a single document.
While I ponder the volume of my journals, I realize that I am unlikely to accomplish all of the digital organization that I can envision. Some of the decisions about what to keep and what to discard will fall to those who come after me. I suspect that much of what is important to me will be less important to my grandchildren, but some of the decisions about what to keep and what to discard will fall to them.
I think about these things from time to time because I am engaged in a monumental task of sorting paper. A lot of that paper comes from those who lived before me.
My mother’s grandfather Roy kept journals. He was a pioneer court reporter in the Montana Territory before the organization of the modern State of Montana. As a trained reporter, he knew how to transcribe conversations and interviews and court proceedings. He applied that skill to his everyday life recording everything from the day’s weather to the number of times one of his children made a bicycle trip to the sermons of their local pastor and some of the pioneer circuit riders. He recorded some important history of the territory, some of which appears to not be recorded elsewhere. But those important recordings, such as transcriptions of sermons by Brother Van and documentation of steamship operations on the Missouri River, are buried in volumes of hand-written notes about the weather, farm production, and everyday life. Reading through his journals is a task that my mother did not accomplish in her lifetime. It is a task that my sister abandoned after attempting it. I don’t think that I will even make the attempt. Somehow, through the complexities of family dynamics, however, I am in possession of those journals - boxes of those journals. I have found a couple of historical archives that are interested in having those journals, but only if they are digitized. They don’t want the paper, but would keep an archive of scanned files.
To get to those files, however, I have to wade through other files. My mother had two large chest freezers in which she kept banker’s boxes of files. She had read that old freezers were good places to keep old papers because of humidity control. It fell to me to deal with the contents of those freezers when a family property was sold. I made a trip to Montana last spring and retrieved the boxes that were in the freezers and arranged for the old appliances to be disposed. Now I’m sorting through those boxes, some of which contain the journals of my great grandfather. I have done enough to discover that those journals are not all that is in the boxes. Among the papers are things saved from my grandfather’s files. He was an attorney and State Senator who served on a number of prominent boards. One of the files that I have recently been sorting, scanning some documents, discarding others, is the record of his time serving on the board of Intermountain Union College. In the fall of 1935, when he was on that board, an earthquake of 6.2 magnitude struck Helena, Montana and destroyed the buildings of the college’s campus. The board made the decision to temporarily move the college to Great Falls. Later the college was moved to the campus of Billings Polytechnic College and eventually the two institutions were merged to form Rocky Mountain College. Both my grandfather and my father served on the Board of Trustees of Rocky Mountain College. I have copies of correspondence and official proceedings from the time of the earthquake that were kept by my grandfather.
My grandfather died before all of his papers were in order. He had files and files of papers, but documents that should have been transferred to places like the college archives never made the trip. Some of those papers can now be transferred to the college archives. Many of them are duplicates of documents that are already held by the college. The man who was president of the college just before I became a student did a masterful job of sifting through those documents and writing a two-volume history of the school and its predecessor institutions. But he did not have access to my grandfather’s files, because they were in boxes in freezers. I’ve been sorting through those papers, keeping a few and discarding a lot. Those that I keep are scanned and stored as digital files and slowly the volume of paper is being reduced. Our house produces over twice the paper for recycling of any other house in our neighborhood. Every two weeks, I carry boxes of paper to the curbside to be loaded into trucks for recycling. Slowly the volume is decreasing.
I realize that my forebears simply were unable to sift and sort through their papers. My mother’s journals are in steno notebooks, hand-written. In the manner of such pads, every other page is upside down which works when you flip through the pads, which are spiral bound at the top, but which defy an automatic document scanner. To prepare a digital file of those notebooks requires hours of editing documents to turn the pages right side up. And much of what is written on those pages has no value to future generations because no one will read through the sheer volume for the few treasures that they contain. However, I run into enough documents that are of great value to keep me engage in trying to organize as I sift and sort.
It remains to be seen whether or not I can get through the task, but I am determined to make a big effort and I am at least decreasing the volume of paper. I am determined not to leave boxes and boxes of papers for my children and grandchildren to sort.
In the meanwhile, I keep writing more and more words. The megabytes of storage have turned into gigabytes. At least future generations won’t have to physically move boxes and boxes of paper if I am diligent and complete my task.
While I ponder the volume of my journals, I realize that I am unlikely to accomplish all of the digital organization that I can envision. Some of the decisions about what to keep and what to discard will fall to those who come after me. I suspect that much of what is important to me will be less important to my grandchildren, but some of the decisions about what to keep and what to discard will fall to them.
I think about these things from time to time because I am engaged in a monumental task of sorting paper. A lot of that paper comes from those who lived before me.
My mother’s grandfather Roy kept journals. He was a pioneer court reporter in the Montana Territory before the organization of the modern State of Montana. As a trained reporter, he knew how to transcribe conversations and interviews and court proceedings. He applied that skill to his everyday life recording everything from the day’s weather to the number of times one of his children made a bicycle trip to the sermons of their local pastor and some of the pioneer circuit riders. He recorded some important history of the territory, some of which appears to not be recorded elsewhere. But those important recordings, such as transcriptions of sermons by Brother Van and documentation of steamship operations on the Missouri River, are buried in volumes of hand-written notes about the weather, farm production, and everyday life. Reading through his journals is a task that my mother did not accomplish in her lifetime. It is a task that my sister abandoned after attempting it. I don’t think that I will even make the attempt. Somehow, through the complexities of family dynamics, however, I am in possession of those journals - boxes of those journals. I have found a couple of historical archives that are interested in having those journals, but only if they are digitized. They don’t want the paper, but would keep an archive of scanned files.
To get to those files, however, I have to wade through other files. My mother had two large chest freezers in which she kept banker’s boxes of files. She had read that old freezers were good places to keep old papers because of humidity control. It fell to me to deal with the contents of those freezers when a family property was sold. I made a trip to Montana last spring and retrieved the boxes that were in the freezers and arranged for the old appliances to be disposed. Now I’m sorting through those boxes, some of which contain the journals of my great grandfather. I have done enough to discover that those journals are not all that is in the boxes. Among the papers are things saved from my grandfather’s files. He was an attorney and State Senator who served on a number of prominent boards. One of the files that I have recently been sorting, scanning some documents, discarding others, is the record of his time serving on the board of Intermountain Union College. In the fall of 1935, when he was on that board, an earthquake of 6.2 magnitude struck Helena, Montana and destroyed the buildings of the college’s campus. The board made the decision to temporarily move the college to Great Falls. Later the college was moved to the campus of Billings Polytechnic College and eventually the two institutions were merged to form Rocky Mountain College. Both my grandfather and my father served on the Board of Trustees of Rocky Mountain College. I have copies of correspondence and official proceedings from the time of the earthquake that were kept by my grandfather.
My grandfather died before all of his papers were in order. He had files and files of papers, but documents that should have been transferred to places like the college archives never made the trip. Some of those papers can now be transferred to the college archives. Many of them are duplicates of documents that are already held by the college. The man who was president of the college just before I became a student did a masterful job of sifting through those documents and writing a two-volume history of the school and its predecessor institutions. But he did not have access to my grandfather’s files, because they were in boxes in freezers. I’ve been sorting through those papers, keeping a few and discarding a lot. Those that I keep are scanned and stored as digital files and slowly the volume of paper is being reduced. Our house produces over twice the paper for recycling of any other house in our neighborhood. Every two weeks, I carry boxes of paper to the curbside to be loaded into trucks for recycling. Slowly the volume is decreasing.
I realize that my forebears simply were unable to sift and sort through their papers. My mother’s journals are in steno notebooks, hand-written. In the manner of such pads, every other page is upside down which works when you flip through the pads, which are spiral bound at the top, but which defy an automatic document scanner. To prepare a digital file of those notebooks requires hours of editing documents to turn the pages right side up. And much of what is written on those pages has no value to future generations because no one will read through the sheer volume for the few treasures that they contain. However, I run into enough documents that are of great value to keep me engage in trying to organize as I sift and sort.
It remains to be seen whether or not I can get through the task, but I am determined to make a big effort and I am at least decreasing the volume of paper. I am determined not to leave boxes and boxes of papers for my children and grandchildren to sort.
In the meanwhile, I keep writing more and more words. The megabytes of storage have turned into gigabytes. At least future generations won’t have to physically move boxes and boxes of paper if I am diligent and complete my task.
