Saving stuff: Preserving heirlooms will ensure they're available for future generations to enjoy

The stuff of our lives — the meaningful things we surround ourselves with, find, are given, gather up, inherit — is the stuff of history.

"These things may not make big money on 'Antiques Roadshow,' but they can have real significance in our lives," says historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who has long enjoyed material culture and the "seriousness of innocuous things."

Ulrich spoke recently at an "Evenings at the Museum" program at the Church History Museum. A professor of history at Harvard University, and immediate past president of the American Historical Association, she is the author of numerous articles and books, including "A Midwife's Tale," which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991.

It was not until the late 1700s, she said, that Americans began to be aware of American history, that they began to, as a man named Jeremy Belknap noted, "search in the garrets and ratholes of old houses," for important artifacts. In 1791 Belknap founded the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first formal society to focus on the history of the United States, and the model for many other societies around the country.

Nineteenth-century New Englanders began to care about objects and about saving them, Ulrich said. "They would stuff everything up into the attic in case they needed it later." An interesting find in an attic of that period: a box full of bits and pieces of string labeled "string too short to be saved."

Many of the other objects that were saved have made their way into museums and to local and national historical societies, making us acutely aware, she said, "of the way objects make history.

History is not what happened, it is an account of the past, based on surviving sources. If there are no sources, there is no history."

In a sense, she said, that makes us all historians. "By caring for your things and the things of your ancestors, you contribute to a larger historic picture."

Even the simplest objects can make a contribution, said Ulrich. "They connect to the past. They are a source of family and national pride. They reinforce family stories. They can surprise us, challenge us, force us to confront things we would just as soon not confront. Objects teach technology. They can inspire us as we make our own history, striking out in our own circumstances, in our own way."