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This resonates with me...I've had two similar experiences. The first was when my father's younger sister gave us a box of photographs she'd taken from Grandpa's house after he died. She'd been the one who did most of the work cleaning out his house after he went to a nursing home; it was less out of a sense of duty and more because she wanted first dibs on his possessions. Dad's older sister passed from cancer just a month before his father died (1995 was rough--we had three major deaths in Dad's family in less than 2 months) and was pretty ill when it came time to go through Grandpa's things, so her participation was minimal, and Dad frankly didn't care about anything left in Grandpa's house and was too busy with work to help. My mom wasn't healthy enough at the time to participate either...anyways, the point of all that is my aunt pretty much took everything and offered items only to her kids. I'm still a little salty about her giving all of Grandma's good china to one of her kids and not offering even a single teacup to the other grandkids; only two of us--myself and my oldest cousin on Dad's side, who's 6 months younger than me--even have any memories of Grandma, and I would've loved to have even a small token to remember her by. But again, I'm getting off topic...anyways, Auntie decided she was tired of storing the big box of loose photos in her house and gave them to us to store in our attic. Dad, Mom and I spent a couple days going through the photos, trying to identify people and tossing out photos that were no longer of any interest to anyone (mainly vacation photos--Dad's family rarely went on vacation and never went anywhere very interesting--and pictures of the neighbors' dogs). I later put most of the photos in albums and stored the rest--mostly duplicates--in a manila envelope that's yes, in a box in the attic. I'd set aside a bunch of photos of Dad's older sister, thinking maybe her children or even later her grandchildren would want them but nobody seems interested, despite the fact my cousins were in their early-mid 20s when their mom died. One bonus: I finally got something to remember Grandma by. She'd assembled a book of mementos when she was in her teens; it's filled with school report cards, greeting cards from family and friends, ticket stubs from events she'd attended and even an actual dance card, with tiny pencil still attached, from a school dance she'd attended. Up until then, I'd always kind of thought "fill your dance card" was more of a metaphor.

Years later, for Mom's 80th birthday, I bought a couple nice photo albums and spent some time with her reminiscing about the contents of the photos, labelling them with time, place and names of subjects, and putting them in (very rough) chronological order in the albums. Again, there were photos with no information on the back, and a few got tossed, though fewer than when I went through Grandpa's box of photos. Mom always felt weird about tossing out photos of people whether she knew them or not.

A couple months ago, a co-worker mentioned to me that neither of her daughters seemed interested in her VERY interesting (to me, anyways) past, and neither have any interest in inheriting anything from her that isn't $$$. Which got me to thinking...I have no children and pretty much all of my nieces and nephews are unsentimental, unlike me. When I die, they're probably going to go through my stuff and toss anything they don't think they can sell, including the dozens of photo albums, big and small, that I've carefully assembled and painstakingly labelled :-(