Well, I hope the "heir" you have realizes the treasure he has in those 27 3-ring binders!
They're preserved, in those transparent plastic "page protectors" that one puts in three-ring binders. As is much else, including family letters going back to the 1830s. They're all in order, for the nephews (three of whom are close to my own age, the other three all at least adults by now).
It was a pain, because Soviet paper is nothing like our 8.5x11 paper, being a little longer and a little narrower than that, and it was a hassle finding page-protectors--and three-ring notebooks--to accomodate that size, but obviously I did. It took a long time, though.
I'm hoping that a generation removed can read such things with detachment; I can't. It's all very sad.
The last time I read a letter by my mother, for example, to an older brother, at a time a teenager away from home, it was a description of how, coming home from the hospital, she opened the garage door and
voila! there was a horse standing there.
We lived in a town of circa 3000 in the Sandhills of Nebraska, and true, on the edge of the city, right next door to a wheat field, but to find a horse inside one's garage was not a usual experience.
A person detached from the individuals could read such a thing and gently laugh at the humor of it, but for me, I felt as if an old man sitting in a rocking-chair staring out into the skies, dreaming of things that once were, but will no longer be.
The heir gets the life-insurance; the nephews get all this family and personal stuff.
