How Heirlooms and Artifacts Can Help You Tell Your Story

When my father died in a fire at his home, all that was left of him was in his car, plus his silver rings that I received from the funeral home.

(How to Turn Artifacts and Research Into a Family Memoir.)

A thermos, a Giants hat, a pocketknife, an old wallet, a clipboard, his sports jacket, and a small little bible sitting next to his rings. It didn’t look like much, but these heirlooms were a part of his daily life and these objects could help me tell his story.

Interestingly, when I looked at the heirlooms I could see a sequential timeline. He had bought a new wallet before he died, so I had found his old one, a gift I made for him at an arts and crafts class in elementary school. The pocketknife in the cupholder reminded me of one he had given me in middle school, his Giants hat was torn and smashed but held memories of my dad attending a few of my track meets in high school and wearing a similar hat. The thermos represented his love of coffee that followed a lifetime of drinking booze.

After I wrote about collecting the keepsakes from his car, I let the heirlooms guide me through my writing journey and started with the wallet and pocketknife. The more I thought about my father using these keepsakes and the memories that resonated off them, the more questions I had about his life.

I regrettably never asked enough questions when he was alive. I knew very little about his family tree and upbringing. I knew he was estranged from his father, and his mother was not a stable figure in his life, and he was not close to his other family members.

My dad spent the last years of his life recovering from a life of instability and alcohol addiction and had experienced homelessness. After I graduated high school in the Syracuse area, I moved to Manhattan, and we saw each other maybe twice a year. We had a ‘phone relationship,’ that is when he had a phone. I had some letters and cards he sent me that shared a different address to write him back each time. We didn’t have special memories besides our short visits that took place usually at the bus station.

I had to sleuth to find answers to supplement my memories.

DWI Records

The first artifact I gathered was his DWI records.

After he died and before I started writing, I had an impulse to gather his DWI records from the county where I grew up. After I started writing, I understood why my mind went directly to the records, they were a way to understand the mistakes he carried with him throughout his life. These memories are in the Pocketknife chapter that’s based on seeing a pocketknife in my father’s car and how the pocketknife looked similar to the one he gave me in middle school, right before he was arrested and went to prison because of his drinking problems.

As his life spirals downward, the heart of the chapter is healing our relationship, when I wanted to walk away. I enjoyed incorporating my searching for artifacts into the story.

“…two and half months after my father died, I sent my payment to the Onondaga County Clerk, with a copy of his death certificate and a letter, asking for any information that was on file under my father’s name. When I read the convictions in these files, my shoulders sink and my heart opens more with what has been left unsaid. I’m making peace while staring at these documents that hold the reasons why I hadn’t always wanted him in my life.”

The DWI records also helped my writing process for the Wallet chapter, which held my best memories of us running on a dirt track near my childhood home the summer before I turned 10. Running together would become a core memory of us in the story, the glue of our relationship. I wrote about my father timing me and sharing racing techniques and the togetherness that would soon end because of his alcoholism. This is where the dates from the DWI records helped me see that my father was falling apart during the time I admired him most.

Health Records

I did not know my father’s health records would be so important to my writing process.

I had stalled on gathering this significant artifact from the clinic. It would turn out to be a goldmine for storytelling. It shared over 100 pages of insight on my dad’s health, mental wellbeing, and his depression, the pages are full of sessions with counselors about his livelihood and his rehab plans. The pages share his time in foster care, his academic path, where he lived and when. I could compare these dates with my own path.

I could weave these facets into the story in my own words and share my adult perspective while braiding the narrative with emotions of my younger self. Mostly, reading the records that span 20 years of his life helped me have empathy for my father as a person despite his obvious flaws.

Reading about the darker days of his life made me wonder: Where did he experience joy? Who was he before he drank so much?

I wanted to include facets of my dad’s younger self, to entwine my adolescence with his in the story.

High School Transcripts

Since his health records confirmed he was a foster child in high school, I looked at his yearbook I gathered after he died from one of his old roommates. Then I reached out to the high school’s records department by email.

My father’s high school’s transcripts revealed his home address and the last name of the family he lived with. A girl in his grade in the yearbook had the same last name. In the Internet age, it wasn’t hard to find her. She was happy to talk with me about my dad. Our conversation was a gift and helped me fill in the gaps to the questions I had and helped me envision where my father had spent happier days in his life. The yearbook showed photos of him on the track team in high school and later I connected with one of his track buddies through email to ask questions about his time as a runner.

When I found a pocket-sized New Testament in my dad’s car, I was surprised. I had only heard him swear about life being hell. In this chapter I try to see my father in a new light. In a box stored away and rediscovered after a move, there were letters my father wrote while doing time in a correctional facility. The letters were over 20 years old. I used the letters within the story, transcribing parts of each one. In one of the letters, he had expressed conversations he had with a Reverend and wrote about reclaiming his life. These letters would help me write the chapter about how my dad’s faith had been restored and his hope that he too could be forgiven.

“I’ll have only 43 days left here after you receive this card. One month and one week; so not forever but it feels like eternity. I’ll have been sober for almost 9 months when I get out and want to do something important with the rest of my life.”

During our last visit, he appeared to be happier than I had ever seen him, just three months before the fire. He gave me some of his writings that day from a small journal. His thoughts on these pages would later be part of the Clipboard chapter.

When I wrote about his rings, I remembered a conversation with my father about the night he lost his rings at the homeless shelter, but I wanted further proof of his time there. I turned to the health records, and I emailed the shelter to gain some information about his stay.

“…while looking at his health records, the counselor notes show he was evicted from a home he was living…I’d see the three days he spent at the Rescue Mission following an eviction. It reads that he was planning to apply for public assistance. In capital letters it reads he is homeless and unemployed.”

Piecing Together Clues

When I was writing about the challenges my dad went through, every little email, document, and transcript was like a clue. Every discovery while writing about my father’s troubles was like having a conversation with him, as though he was alive.

In the Giants hat chapter, I reminisce about my own high school track accomplishments by using my binders full of racing stats that coincide with my father’s health records, so I could compare what I was achieving when my father was on probation and failing to get a grip on his life.

To gain a fuller understanding of my father’s young adult life, I needed more information: his military records, his college transcripts, and a copy of his diploma, then I found articles he wrote for a college newspaper that were archived online.

All of these documents improved the story I wanted to tell about our special connection and finding healing after sudden loss. Every artifact helped my grief tremendously along the way too.

After the memoir was published in 2023, I kept searching for more artifacts. When I gathered a copy of my father’s birth certificate it was added to a memory box I can share with my kids. Other keepsakes will wait and will be shared when they are older.

The pages of my story are filled with sorrow, grief, and hardship. I know my father was an imperfect person, but I don’t see him that way; the artifacts showed me who he was beyond his struggles and mistakes.