Is stuff online worth saving?

One hundred twenty-three years ago my great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel in Kansas City from asphyxiation from the gas having been left on over night (the hotel did not yet have electric lighting). A letter was hastily written on a piece of hotel stationary to be delivered to his wife in the neighboring farming community where she lived.

It is fortunate to me that someone thought to hang on to that note since I have become interested in genealogy and this was a fairly significant event in family history (had he not died I don't suppose I would be around since it was her second marriage that gave me my grandfather).

I long for scraps of anything that my dead relatives, wrote, created, etc. It connects me better to the past — the lives they lived, how they lived them. It somehow grounds me a little better ... well, it's rather hard to explain the draw of genealogy.

Sadly very little of the ephemera of everyday life was kept. I get it. It might have seemed like hanging on to junk mail — like you were a hoarder or whatever, but in this digital era we should be able to hold terabytes of what may appear to be ephemera.

I'm doing what I can – not for ego, I think, but for future generations that may find a connection to their past interesting.

This reminds me of a recent flea market experience. There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera.

It's hard to assign a value to these things. They are simultaneously junk and treasure. I think about the journey these items took to find their way to that flea market table. It was too diverse a collection to have come from one place. So I imagine all the paths each individual item traversed. The joy of the recipient reading a post card, holding on to it, rediscovering it on spring cleaning days. Or the photo living in an album or framed on a wall somewhere for a lifetime.

I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each.