Found a box of old family photos while clearing a house — now what?
The house is half-empty, the skip is arriving Thursday, and you've just uncovered a box of photographs you've never seen before.
5 min read
House clearances put people under time pressure, which is exactly the wrong pressure to be under when you're looking at a hundred years of family history.
The single most useful thing you can do is move the box out of the clearance house entirely. Take it home. Put it somewhere dry. The decisions can wait.
What to keep, without agonising
As a rule of thumb: every photograph, every negative, every slide, every scrap of paper with handwriting. It sounds excessive, but a single shoebox of photographs takes up almost no space, and the cost of throwing away something irreplaceable is much higher than the cost of storing a box for a year.
What is safe to skip
Empty photo album covers with no photos in them. Old picture frames with nothing behind them. Duplicate holiday brochures. Anything printed commercially that isn't personal.
If you're really pushed for time
Take the whole box home unopened. Better to sort it in your kitchen next spring than to make ten decisions in ten minutes on a clearance day.
Trusted with family archives
Umberdosh Restoration
If the box turns out to be more than you can face sorting alone, we handle bereavement and clearance collections regularly — nothing is thrown away, and everything comes back to you organised.
Related guides across the whole Help hub: What to do with a parent's photos and papers after they move into care, Cleared the house, kept the box: what to do with inherited family photographs, You don't have to sort it all at once — a calm guide to inherited family archives, Grandma's boxes: where to start when you don't know what's inside, How to protect family photos and documents after a bereavement, without rushing, VHS to digital: DIY vs professional — an honest comparison, How much does it cost to digitise old family photos in the UK?, Can you still get VHS tapes played? Here's what's actually happening to old tape, 35mm slides in the loft: are they still worth saving?, What actually happens to a VHS tape's picture quality over time, Cine film, slides, cassettes: a plain-English guide to what you might find in an old box, Why acid-free sleeves matter more than people think, How archivists actually store family photographs (and how you can too), The mistakes that damage old photographs faster than time does, Should you ever throw away 'duplicate' family photos? An archivist's view, What museums do differently when handling old paper and photographs, How to start researching your family history from a single box of documents, What can a photograph actually tell a genealogist?, Common family stories that turn out to be (partly) true, How to research one specific family mystery without committing to a full family tree, The best gift for a parent who has everything: their own history, restored, A Christmas gift that isn't a thing: digitising a lifetime of family photos, How to split family photographs between siblings without falling out, What to keep and what to let go: deciding without regret, JPEG or TIFF? Choosing the right file format for scanned photographs, How long do digital files actually last? Backups explained simply, Scanning photos with your phone vs a flatbed: what you actually lose, Storing photographs in a damp British house: what actually works, Looking after 8mm and Super 8 cine film before it's digitised, Why the framed photos on your wall are fading faster than the ones in the box, How to date an undated photograph from clothing, cars and card stock, Recording the stories before they're lost: interviewing older relatives, A golden anniversary gift: their wedding album, restored and shareable
