Dear Etiquetteer:
My parents both died in the past year. When emptying out their storage unit my siblings and I found a bag of documents belonging to our step-grandfather. We never met this person (he died before the oldest one of us was born) and we don't know of any relatives of his still alive.
I recently attended my high school reunion and met someone there who did genealogy for a hobby. She researched our step-grandfather and found that he had no children. Without doing significantly more research there's no way for us to find out if he has any blood relations alive.
My question for Etiquetteer is: what should we do with our step-grandfather's documents? There doesn't seem to be anything of value in this bag. Is it OK if I just throw it out? I can't imagine I'll do that, but I'm more likely to do that if you say it's OK.
Dear Beneficiary:
This may come as a shock, but Etiquetteer has no qualm with your disposal of these papers. You have performed due diligence to find other kinfolk who might want them, found no one, and that’s enough. As no surviving family member ever met your grandmother’s husband, and you yourself have determined that there’s nothing of value*, the most Perfectly Proper thing you can do for the smooth running of your own household is to dispose of them.
Etiquetteer understands your reluctance to toss out these papers from personal experience. It feels like erasing someone’s existence when the time comes to clean out of a house and divide a collection of belongings, especially when there are no heirs. And it feels strange, a little like a violation, to throw things in the trash that have been preserved and maintained, sometimes with great care, by their deceased owners. But it’s clear that you have no use for them, nor will your heirs in their turn.
On the day you throw things out, ease the blow by offering up a special toast to your step-grandfather at dinner that night. And next day, start to go through your own papers so that your heirs won’t have to make similar decisions. Marie Kondo’s famous Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is one very helpful resource**. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning is another, but Etiquetteer hasn’t yet delved into it. Etiquetteer wishes you well as you begin this journey.
*Etiquetteer still has some mementos cherished by a deceased relative — for instance, a baseball autographed by an entire high school baseball team — that had value only to the deceased.
**This is how That Mr. Dimmick Who Thinks He Knows So Much discovered almost 100 empty wire hangers clogging a clothes closet, just one instance of how valuable this book is.