Rouviere Media

Using your brief history, inventory list, and statement of what you want to have in your museum, identify some themes around which you could build your museum. Each theme should be what you want visitors to understand or know about your family history. Your visitors should be able to see where the display is going and how to connect the information you’re giving them. Themes will do this by giving unity and coherence to the displays in your museum.

There is a danger of telling visitors more than they want to know or can assimilate, or of planning a museum that is more than you have time or resources to put together and maintain. Identifying three to four major themes will simplify your project and make your displays easier to follow and more meaningful. When you weave  these themes together, they will provide a storyline that is a summary of the important ideas, events, and features that make your heirloom collection special.

The theme should be of primary importance to the history of the family and the collection. It should not be too broad. You should be able to say in a sentence what each of your themes are.  When you have written each of your major theme sentences, consider whether each one could be expressed more clearly. Ask yourself whether it is complete or should be expanded to include other ideas or narrowed to include less. Then ask yourself whether you can illustrate that theme with the heirlooms and research you have.

For example, from looking at my family’s history of ranching in Western Colorado, it would be natural to put cattle ranching down as one of my themes.  My inventory shows that I have a saddle, a bridle, some spurs, a branding iron, an old brand book, and numerous ranch photographs, so this looks like a good possibility. By looking at my inventory, I also see that I have a large number of items that came from my grandmother’s kitchen. That makes the theme of my grandmother’s kitchen another natural one for my museum.

My statement includes an emphasis on my husband’s Mormon pioneer ancestry.  We have  little in the way of artifacts, but we do have copies of Mormon pioneer documents and a few photographs, so this could be a small display.

Some themes are less obvious. After some thought and looking at these three sources, I decided to do a communications display that spanned the generations in my family. My family ran the community post office for 95 years, my grandmother was the local telephone operator, and my grandparents were the local newspaper correspondents.  My husband and I were foreign correspondents in Asia and have some things that we collected from that experience. So I decided to put together a display that including those items. I deliberately designed it to look like someone had just left their desk for a moment and would be back soon.

Another theme that worked well in our museum was a children’s shelf. We had children’s toys, books, and school items spanning five generations, and decided to do a display with a children’s theme. The display includes 100-year-old board games,  dolls both antique and modern, my 47-year-old teddy bear, the cup the orphanage gave our son when we adopted him, my husband’s Boy Scout bandalo, our son’s cub scout pins, and old school books from the turn of the century.

Women in my family loved to cook, sew, and do textile crafts, so that was another theme that emerged from looking at my family heirlooms. I ended up doing a shadow box of antique sewing notions which I hung next to my own sewing cabinet, and also a shelf with some crocheted items, cookbooks, a flatiron, and other similar items.

Besides major themes such as these that stick out,  you may come across smaller subthemes which could be illustrated with  one or two heirlooms. For example,  I framed my grandparents’ wedding picture with some of their monogrammed jewelry from that era in a small tribute to them.  My great great grandparents’ pipe organ sits in our living room with a photograph of them sitting by the organ and a small label saying that it was shipped by wagon across the United States from the factory in Chicago.

Next week, photographs of displays using some of these themes plus some other examples....