Buried in Family Photos and Papers

It was not my intention to be the family historian, but I am the person to whom all the old pictures and papers have passed. It could be worse than it is; they only go back to about 1925 or so, and only get plentiful starting in the years just after WWII.

Today I started unpacking the basement-stinking box to better organize and more safely store, and of course it's a huge mess, with hundreds of pictures which don't identify the people, place, or year, photo albums with the pictures firmly glued in or on, albums which seem to be gathering miscellaneous pictures without any connecting theme or pattern I can see, lots of personal papers and newspaper clippings, plus pictures I can't imagine anyone wanting (but it seems so wrong to just throw away a picture!). Just overwhelming.

So far I've sorted things into eight or ten piles, mostly by who's in the pictures/whose papers these are/who these clippings are about, but of course you get some things that fit multiple categories, and what pile does that go in?

Surely some of you have dealt with similar tasks. Have you found a best way to group, catalogue, organize, or otherwise deal? Did you scan every single thing so there's a more permanent record? Did you catalogue or make a spreadsheet or anything? That's my best idea so far, a spreadsheet, but it sounds like a huge pain.

Help!

One thing we're discussing is scanning much of the collection, over a period of months, and discarding the paper copies of a lot of it. We can send digital scans to any family member whose email we have, and they can store them or delete as they choose.

Some solid ideas there. Thanks!

Is tiff one of the options on a typical scanner? Mr. Maryn's doing the scanning. I have an ancient one and I know it can only do jpg and gif. I can't remember, maybe bitmap...

I'm very aware that although there's no sign these photos and papers were ever wet, they were stored in a cardboard box and in file folders, Tyvek envelopes, an plastic bags in various basements including my own, none of which kept that horrific mildew smell from permeating the entire collection. That's part of the reason Mr. Maryn and I are leaving them spread out in our underutilized living room, to let the smell dissipate and the papers to get truly dry before being stored away. I plan to buy archival-paper envelopes and a seal-able plastic bin or six. But they'll have to go back to the basement. We have no attic floor in this house.

Maryn, who may frame some of the pix