Archiving & Inventory

Every family has its own legacy, illuminated by the personal items its ancestors left behind. These objects bring the past vividly to life in the present.

Often it’s the ordinary possessions of everyday people that best capture the essence of who they were. Handwritten recipe cards, knitting needles that were the source of cherished sweaters, a simple wooden toy made in a home workshop—these are the tangible reminders of lives well lived.

Whether you have precious family heirlooms and historical records to preserve, memorabilia or important paperwork to get in order, or items of personal property that you wish to document for insurance purposes, we’re here to help.

A few examples of our work:

Protecting Cherished Family Heirlooms

Our client’s ancestors were high-profile captains of industry in banking, shipping and the railroads, and were prominent members of New York society during the Gilded Age. The personal items they left behind tell the story of their education in the nation’s top schools, the extraordinary professional success they achieved and the lives of luxury they led.

Preserving the History of a Political Dynasty

Our client’s husband was the scion of a powerful political family in the midwest. During the 1980s, he was a popular lieutenant governor in the same state where his father and grandfather had served as governor from the 1950s through the 1970s.

When her husband passed away suddenly, our client needed help navigating the roles of conservator and curator of the memorabilia from the family’s three generations of political history, including campaign buttons and bumper stickers, media clippings, legacy documents passed down from grandfather to father to son, offering advice and strategies for success, and a decades-spanning trove of photographs of the respective candidates with a veritable Who’s Who in politics, from President Eisenhower to John and Robert Kennedy, as well as with family members and supporters at roadside diners across the state.

We organized and catalogued the entire collection, preserving the tangible artifacts of three unique political and personal histories. Our goal was to chronicle for our client’s children—and for their children—their ancestors’ remarkable life stories, and their inspiring, enduring dedication to public service.

Documenting a Photographer’s Extraordinary Body of Work 

Our client was born into a prominent family of artists in Paris in the mid-1920s. He immigrated to the U.S. after the end of World War II, and became a writer, photographer and, ultimately, a legendary photojournalist. He traveled extensively throughout the African continent in the 1960s, capturing iconic images of everyday people, and chronicling their rapidly changing way of life.

We sorted through a career’s worth of his photos, film negatives, slides, contact sheets and other photographic materials, so that they could be catalogued and designated for donation to art and cultural institutions. Our mission was to ensure that the stories in his intimate portraits would continue to be told to new audiences for decades to come.