04/05/2026
When I share these photos of my collection, it is by no means to brag or boast. It’s to express my feelings of this overwhelming desire to protect and safely keep family memories that might otherwise end up in a dumpster.
I get a bit overwhelmed at the amount of work I have in order to keep up with reading, researching and cataloging them all. But I really shouldn’t call it work, it’s a blessing and something I think of almost every minute of every day.
In one of the photos of the larger safes, on the bottom, there’s a brown box. Inside the box are 7 diaries from the late 1990s. I found them listed on eBay about 10 years ago. The seller talked about how inside the diaries the woman wrote about her life of terrible family abuse. I thought these things need to be off the web and to be taken care of and I wanted to make sure to do that. Needless to say, I won the auction and when I got them home and browsed through them quickly, I found the following entry written by our author, “I hope and pray my “life here” doesn’t end up in a storage unit.” I asked the seller where he got them and sure enough, in her storage unit. Well, they aren’t there any longer, they are safe, sharing a space among other families who have gone before her and I vow to try to keep it that way.
