How to Manage a Family Archive
Anna Mathias discusses how to manage a family archive of photographs, diaries, and other documents, including how to present materials.
When my father Milton Gendel died in 2018, weeks shy of his 100th birthday, I inherited our family archive. Half of the material in this collection of journals, letters, and papers is made up of the diary Milton wrote from 1966 until his death. Each entry consists at least one side of paper, letter-size, almost always typed, and on occasion stretching to three or four pages. Every day is a fascinating run-through of my father’s activities and social encounters, little synopses of world daily news, and moments of introspection, at times deeply personal, not to say intimate. This diary of five decades takes up nine filing cabinet drawers.
Moving up the family tree and to a shelf above my desk, another box file contains material generated by my father, but recorded by his mother, my Russian Jewish grandmother Anna Gendel. Anna’s handwritten account of growing up in the shtetl of Kurnitz near Minsk, and her life as an immigrant to New York was recorded at Milton’s request in the late 1950s and then typed up by my mother, the British aristocrat Judy Montagu. It is vibrant and spirited, a highlight being the account of Anna’s arrest after defending demonstrators on the picket line of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Strike in 1911.
A sideways shift to Judy whose service in the British Army as an officer in the anti-aircraft batteries can be traced through the lively correspondence between 20-year-old Captain Montagu on the front line of World War II and her mother, Venetia. One of the most remarkable letters sees Judy sipping a cup of tea in Reading when a German airplane, a Junkers drops a “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” Her actions in helping the shocked and wounded led to her commendation for bravery.
Venetia, whose maiden name was Stanley, has earned a place in the history books and bestseller lists for her own letter exchange with Prime Minister H.H. Asquith during the First War. At the height of their affair Asquith would write to my grandmother several times a day, from cabinet meetings often revealing state secrets. These indiscrete and fascinating missives are now kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but my family archive still contains papers relating to this historic exchange of letters, some as recently as 2024 when Robert Harris wrote about the relationship in his novel Precipice, one of 10 million books sold by this master of historical fiction.
Over the last few years the archive has been central to the publication of my mother Judy Montagu’s Greyhound Diary (Zulieka Books, 2025). The diary itself was the first part of my own archive, handed over by my father in 2000, in the same format as was typed up during Judy’s three-month, 9,000-mile tour of the US in 1949. To make the most of the diary, itself a well-written, often hilarious account of adventures such as riding in a Texan rodeo, tea with Mary Pickford in Hollywood, or the love affair with Governor Adlai Stevenson which started at the end of her journey, it needed an introduction and footnotes. Filed at home under ‘Stevenson, Adlai’ were letters of such tenderness that the romance was clear. A visit to Springfield, Illinois, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library where Governor Stevenson’s papers are held confirmed what my home archive had suggested.
Any treasured document of family history, given the right presentation, the correct context, is valuable. All it takes is research to discover the relationships a letter might describe, and the historical and geographical situation of its time. Even if the material you have is not hugely exciting, you can make it so by the way you present it and the narrative arc you conceive. This will be based on the highs and lows of your family’s life, the life-changing events that we all enjoy or endure. Moreover, databases such as Ancestry’s can support your own archive with public records to enhance a story about military service or a disputed legacy, or the birth of longed-for children.
The first step is to file your material so that you know where to find it. Depending on how many documents you have this may also be the moment to scan them; digitalized material is searchable. The most problematic issue in publishing may be gaining the agreement of family members if you have delicate or private material. Much of my archive will have to be kept sealed for some years to protect familial sensitivities. Here you will have to employ your greatest diplomatic skills to imply rather than reveal. Last of all, the physical qualities of old cards, photographs, old-fashioned handwriting can be compelling, and can make for fascinating illustrations to the way you write up your family history.
Check out Judy Montagu's The Greyhound Diary here:
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