How many studio portraits of your Grandmother do you need? Some genealogists have to ask that question–or a very similar one. It’s not easy to decide and it’s not easy to cull things from a collection of family artifacts and memorabilia. But sometimes it needs to happen. Collections need to be curated.
I have numerous prints of studio portraits of my maternal grandparents. Some I have a half a dozen copies of. They have been digitized and identified. The question is: how many physical copies do I keep? I cannot keep them all. I have decided to keep no more than two copies of any one pose or setting. That is it (and that may be too much). The others will have to be recycled.
If I only had two photos of my grandparents, it would be different. But that’s not my situation. My grandparents have two grandchildren, not twenty-two. While it may sound harsh, sometimes ephemera needs to be culled from a collection of materials to maximize the chance that the collection as a whole survives as long as possible.
The larger and more unwieldly a collection is, the higher the chance that at some point it is not preserved or someone else decides what goes. I would rather that person be me.
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