As described at the beginning of this journey, the second investigation I’m carrying out is into my mother’s collections. She sold her house earlier this year before going into a Care Home, and my involvement in clearing the house contents has given me a unique insight into all her possessions. Of particular use has been the photos I took of various collections of objects (glassware, for example) in order to ask if any members of the family would like to have any items. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I am naming this overall set of items the CONTRAB collection (selected because my mother used to play Contract Bridge) and shall only refer to it in that way going forward.

This post will outline the overall contents of CONTRAB, in terms of the categories of items it contains, and the number of items in each category. Subsequent posts will discuss the types of collections that the categories fall into; and what practices were associated with the CONTRAB categories.  A final post will record what implications for combining collections have emerged from this examination of CONTRAB.

CONTRAB is the collection of objects belonging to an elderly widower who has downsized her house. It consists of 8972 items in 56 different categories. However, before exploring the make-up of these  items, the following key points need to be remembered:

• These are point-in-time numbers. A substantial number of items will have been discarded in the downsizing move. Figures from even earlier than that, and Lifetime Total figures, will be substantially higher.
• The categories into which these items have been placed, have not been defined by the owner, but instead by a relative. The owner may well have specified different categories and used different criteria to place items into those categories.
• 3448 of the 8972 items are photographs. This indicates how misleading the absolute numbers can be. Consequently, greater emphasis has been placed on percentages. In some cases, the photo numbers have been excluded entirely from the calculations.
• Sometimes groups of items have been counted as a single item, thereby underestimating item numbers. For example, the needles and pins in the overall collection of sewing equipment have not been counted individually. Indeed, there are several items in the sewing collection that could have been counted in a number of different ways. Another example of how choices have had to be made is that it was decided to count a pair of shoes as 1 item not 2. Despite these qualifications, the numbers in different categories do give an indication of scale.
• In some cases, too much work would have been involved to undertake a detailed accurate count, so a guess was made. This is what was done with the sewing equipment.

The 56 Categories into which the items have been placed are shown in the figure below, together with percentage totals both including and excluding photos.

The largest category, excluding photos, is Household Goods. This wide-ranging category is further broken down in the table below.

The figures in these tables speak for themselves: if you exclude the large number of photos, well over 50% of the items consist of either Household Goods and Documents. However, that is perhaps unsurprising. Of greater interest is the types of collections that these categories fall into: 46 are Accumulations, and, of the other ten, five are Amateur Collections, four are Files, and one is an Archive. The following post describes these different types of collection in more detail.