Rouviere Media

It is not possible to properly display and preserve everything about your family’s history. If you did, your home and life would be like a junk shop. It is important to define what the purpose of your museum is and what type of heirlooms you are interested in so that you aren’t overrun with too many items or so confused by the complexity of your museum project that you never  display or store anything properly.  You must be selective, and narrowing your family history down to the summary we talked about in last week's blog enables you to establish what museums call a collections policy. This is a statement of what you are interested in collecting and what you are not so that you can do a good job of collecting what you believe is really significant about your family’s history.

You may be particularly interested in preserving the history of one ancestor or one family line. You may be interested only in your direct family line and not in cousins. While I communicate with my cousins and other relatives frequently on family history, I concentrate my efforts on collecting information and items primarily about my direct ancestors and their children.

Within those parameters, my main concentration has been on my father’s family because I happened to inherit a large number of heirlooms and documents from that side of the family, but comparatively little  from my mother's family and my husband has little from his family. 

In addition, we have reserved part of our museum to highlight our life as a family with a background in Asia and four adopted Asian children.

You may be interested in collecting a particular class of items that were important in your family history. If your grandfather was a carpenter, you may have a particular interest in antique tools. Because we have a professional background in photography and historic photos, we have made a point of collecting family photographs of all types.

Our family museum collections policy looks like this: 

Our family museum’s purpose is to:

Preserve the history of our direct ancestors and their children, especially the McGregor, Rouviere and McClellan lines that make up the bulk of our heirloom collection.

Use family heirlooms to teach our children the values that these branches of our families exemplify.

Teach our children about their Asian heritage.

Preserve, organize and publish our collection of historic family photographs .

While we welcome heirlooms and information from other family lines, and happily collect those items or information that are offered to us, we concentrate on the areas above because they constitute the bulk of our collection. 

Next week, Identifying major themes for your family museum...