I’m My Family’s Archivist, and You Can Be One, Too

What I kept, what I threw out, and why it’s important to provide the next generation a connection to their past

Bill Donahue,

AARP

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Published April 10, 2026

an illustration shows a man looking at an open book. He’s in front of a tree with old family photos hanging from its branches and a bookcase shaped like a pyramid

Family records and memorabilia can tell fascinating stories of a particular time and place.

Lily Qian

After my uncle left the monkhood (and also Catholicism) in 1979, he repaired to a small, crumbling cottage in the foothills of the French Pyrenees and spent much of the next quarter century translating Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War from Greek into Latin, meticulously scribing his work into perfect-bound notebooks.

When my uncle died, in 2007, my father told me he was just going to toss all 60 or so of those notebooks. “You’re never going to read them,” he said, “and nobody else is, either.”

a photo shows author Bill Donahue heading to the attic where he stores his family archives.

Author Bill Donahue heads to the attic where he stores his family archives.

Courtesy Bill Donahue

I flew to France that fall expressly to save the notebooks, then trundled them home in two liquor boxes. And now, 19 years on, I have to concede that not a single one of those notebooks has been read cover to cover.

But I have from time to time opened them and beheld my uncle’s tiny, exquisite script. I’ve given away a dozen or so notebooks to friends and relatives, and they’ve marveled with me over how, amid the distractions of the modern world, my uncle practiced patience and exactitude.

In saving my uncle’s notebooks, I’ve helped to keep his spirit alive. I think that way because I’m a family archivist. I shore up papers, old photographs and artifacts that tell the story of my people.

a photo shows a plaque marking the day of his promotion from priest to monsignor

Donahue’s great-uncle became a monsignor in Philadelphia in 1961. This plaque marks the day of his promotion from priest to monsignor.

Courtesy Bill Donahue

In a roughly 150-square-foot, low-ceilinged attic space affixed with six bookshelves, I have a trove of florid letters my grandfather wrote during his days as a naval officer in World War I. I have the high-relief brass plaque bearing a bust of my great-uncle Philip Donahue, to mark the day in 1961 that the Catholic Church made him a monsignor, and I have the girlhood Brownie uniform that my late mother wore in 1938, in defiance of the law, when she and my grandmother lived in Mussolini’s Italy.

The boxes in my attic are lodged at odd angles; documents spill out of their sides. Marie Kondo would surely disapprove, but that bothers me not.

There’s a deeper reason for my archival efforts. Life is uneven, pocked by episodes of pain and alienation. Myself, I got divorced at 32, and the raising of my only child was fractious.

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The papers in my archives are helpful because they capture my forebears facing struggles of their own. In the early 1890s, my great-grandmother watched two children die before they turned 3. In 1901, my Terre Haute, Indiana, ancestors endured a terrible drought, and worried, in longhand, about the withering of the corn on their farm by the banks of the Wabash.

a photo circa 1900 shows author Bill Donahue’s great-great-uncle, who was a baseball player for the Chicago Colts, a precursor to the Cubs

This circa 1900 photo shows Donahue’s great-great-uncle, who was a major league baseball player: a catcher for the Chicago Colts, a precursor to the Cubs.

Courtesy Bill Donahue

Such struggles come and then give way to lovely and singular triumphs. In the 1890s, my great-grandfather’s brother, Timothy Donahue, was a catcher for the Chicago Colts (later the Orphans), a precursor to the Cubs.

The documents in my archive link me to moments great and small in American history, and that’s a steadying thing.

It’s a vine to cling to, thanks to my mother, who preserved the papers of my ancestors, both maternal and paternal, on a bookshelf next to the ping-pong table in my childhood basement. Those papers were of value to her; she was a writer of history books.

But saving them was mostly an act of faith — of waiting and hoping that they would mean something to her children. For decades, they did not. That bookshelf was, to me and my siblings, just a place where ping-pong balls could get lost.

But then in 1994, when I was 30, I became interested in my great-great-uncle Tim, the ballplayer, and asked my mom to ship me the clippings about him. She was delighted. Her long bet had hit pay dirt.

Now my archive is, like the basement bookshelf of my youth, waiting, its future uncertain. But a few months ago, hope shuddered through me as I read an article in The Paris Review.

A 1938 photo shows Bill Donahue’s grandmother and her boyfriend visiting Venice, Italy, with Donahue’s mother, who was 8 at the time

In this 1938 photo, Donahue’s grandmother and her boyfriend, Rinaldo Arese — who in time would become her second husband, then her second ex-husband — visited Venice, Italy, with Donahue’s mother, who was 8 at the time. Amid a custody battle and on Arese’s advice, his grandmother skipped the U.S. with her daughter to Mussolini’s Italy for 10 months.

Courtesy Bill Donahue

Written by my niece, Isabelle Appleton, this reported essay saw Isabelle repeatedly visiting the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn to pore over back issues of a late 20th-century periodical, The Wishing Well, which ran detailed personal ads from women looking for other women.

As Isabelle conducted her research, she decided that the letters in The Wishing Well were “not merely records of longing, but creative acts — invocations, calls into being.”

Was this not an archivist in the making? Recently I called Isabelle, who’s 28, and this child of the digital age reveled in visiting an actual “physical space” to do research.

She recalled a 2023 visit to my archives, and assured me, “People my age are interested in archives, libraries, letter-writing — in ephemera from other times. The internet hasn’t erased an enduring interest in family history.”

When I hung up, I was hopeful that decades, perhaps even centuries, hence, the stories shelved in my attic would find new life. When you’re an archivist, you have to believe.

Tips for being a family archivist

Find a good attic space for your archives. Basements and garages are damp and prone to mildew and pests.

Store papers in acid-free archival boxes. Plastic traps moisture, which might make papers moldy.

Winnow. My parents left behind myriad scrapbooks chronicling the travels they took in old age. I didn’t want the scrapbooks to drown out the story of their youth, so I tossed dozens.

Separate the gems. My uncle left behind scores of handwritten homilies. I’ve stored the best ones separately lest they get lost in the swarm.

Refrain from censorship. If your great-grandfather cheated in bowling — well, that’s interesting. It’s a human story of a particular place and time.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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