Who keeps those?
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My husband. He uses punchhole day planners and at the end of every month, puts the used ones in a file and inserts the new month’s. He has boxes of client files that go back 23 years and portfolios of projects from his years in commercial art and jewelry. Every house project has its own file of plans, materials lists and receipts.
He keeps receipts, cancelled checks, owners manuals, a few newspaper clips that had meaning and has always been a photographer, so we have rolls of negatives, boxes of slides, all the old media and prints. He kept his old hard drives.
We are downsizing, so much of that has been triaged just this year. He is 67 and just discarded paperwork from the 1970s a few years ago.
I think it is genetic. His father died in 1994 and had memorabilia, including tax receipts, newspapers and letters, etc from the 1950s plus items from pre-WWII Norway. His mother passed in the ‘80s and she had kept the boys’ old toys, school projects, recipes, newspaper clippings, personal letters, holiday cards and actual diaries. We have scrapbooks and diaries from his maternal grandmother. We may have a few items left from his Norwegian grandparents, pre-WWI.
Some people are very organized and value such record-keeping. Me, OTOH: I live in the moment and have a tiny little collection of papers and such from my past 75 years. When I triaged my art portfolios, my husband snuck out some of the discards and squirreled them away.
A logical mind with an appreciation for history, a connection to identity and a sense of personal culture is what I associate with this behavior.
Sounds like my dad. He was the treasurer/accountant for several orgaizations, he LIKED doing taxes and kept receipts from way back. Good thing, as it has helped with his estate.
He also kept some greeting cards. Sentimental.
It’s the sheer volume of in for that I can’t fathom. I keep old cards, letters, photos and kid memorabilia and that is a lot of stuff. I routinely go through my boxes to get rid of things. We are doing a better job of scanning and storing info online these days.