Not everyone is lucky enough to have had much contact with their parents or grandparents, or know much about their family history, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot know the love of family or what it means. They say blood is thicker than water, but this phrase fails to note just how many loving families are built on adoptive arrangements, or step-family members coming together, or people who love one another as they might do their own blood, despite not coming together at all. Married couples aren’t blood-related, and yet they can be some of the strongest bonds we know, and we fail to mention the incredibly powerful force of friendship at our peril.
Why start an article off like this? Well, it shows that if you wish to invest in something, pass something down, or care for an item given to you, you don’t have to be strictly in a conventional familial setting to weigh this with absolute importance. If you do, that’s fantastic, too. But it can often be quite disorienting and worrying to take care of an item, heirloom, or relic passed down (or that you’re intending to pass down) thanks to their value, emotional and financial.
No matter if you’re curating a beautiful Patek Philippe, or preserving historical documents and journals, let’s consider how to best go about this arrangement.
Storage Containers & Boxes
Keeping your keepsakes in protective storage is important. The box they are held in is the first thing to consider. Sometimes, a small briefcase hard shell and shapen-foam lining can help you store the item with little tracking room. It might be that for larger items, such as paintings, purchasing dust sheets and using professional storage solutions is a great idea.
Environmental Protections
Protecting against the environment of your stored area is also important. It might be that your item is sturdy, but if stored in a damp attic for a number of years, the colors may wash out. Make sure you consider temperature, humidity, air exposure, and other variables that may influence how regularly you need to change the storage location of your valuable items, as well as how often you need to maintain them. Make sure to ask these questions of yourself. They will help you come to the best possible result.
Insurance
It can’t hurt to insure your heirlooms and keepsakes. Some of them are too important to be rid of, but if something does happen, knowing you have the value protected is important. This might simply be insurance against damage or theft, or in the case of collector’s items, large-bath insurance plans that help keep your collection safe and that may also help authenticate documents when it comes to sale in the future. You can bet there are many insured first-edition comic books and action figures sat, accruing value, in storage units all around the world.
With this advice, we hope you can protect your ceremonial or traditional familial heirlooms in the best possible sense.
