I'm having problems with this, and the old DU's too messed up to resolve it:
There are 13 cousins in my generation. Two subsequent generations have sprouted.
Just before the current DU came into existence, and shortly after hippyhubby Wild Bill forced hippywife Mrs. Alfred Packer to abandon the primitives, Judy grasswire posted something about making Christmas cookies, an endeavor in which apparently a descendant of hers was involved too.
She identified him as a "great-great-grandson," and she identified him two times, not only one time, as such. So it wasn't any typographical error or brain-fart. One got the impression he was pretty small, probably less than five years old.
Five generations in her lifetime.
.....This archive is in the hands (unfortunately) of a near hoarder. She has scooped up everything for decades.....
My story's similar; from a very young age, I was being presented by family relics by elderly relatives, including not only photographs, letters, and diaries, but also full sets of old china and silver and linen, clocks, and somesuch.
This happened simpy because of all my brothers and sisters, and cousins, and second cousins, and third cousins, I was the only one who expressed any interest in family history.
These things came to me; I didn't solicit them (in fact, most of the time I had no idea such things had ever existed, and in a few cases, I'd never even met the ancient relative who presented them to me).
I've taken very good care of them.
.....How do families deal with the items that should be commonly available?.....
That's the bitch of it. I have all this stuff, and as my brothers and sisters died prematurely from the ailments and afflictions of the too-soft, too-easy, too-comfortable, too-secure sort of life, I'm the last one left. I have six nephews, all of them adults (I also had two nieces, but they departed this time and place a long time ago), four of them married and with children.
This mountainous mass of stuff isn't worth donating to any museum, as it's mostly all related to Pennsylvania, and not Nebraska. It's good stuff, great stuff, but it simply has no "relation" to where it's at, which is here, in Nebraska.
Over the years, I've doled out parts of it to the nephews and their wives, but I'm nervous about whether or not I'll be completely done with distribution before I spring loose of this moral coil myself.
I got nothing against Judy grasswire personally, and wish I could advise and counsel her on the matter, but I really can't.