I am starting the holiday witha massive tidy! We live in a five bedroom and one bathroom house, but two of the rooms are taken up with sewing and ironing, and historical research respectively. Actually 'historical research' is a bit pompous for what I do, but the room is buried under a sea of papers surrounding my enthusiasm for family, local, theatrical and nineteenth century social history.

I have completed the stage 1 tidy of this rooms with large boxes filled roughly with the categories above, plus a couple of 'miscellaneous' as well as two bags of paper salvage and one of mainly plastic rubbish.

Stage 2 will be taking each category and filing the contents of that box or basket.

Stage 3 will be re filing it and putting it away in some sort of logical order.

I have come across a huge envelope of obviously well-thumbed scripts for what appear to be educational programmes on creative writing. Are they my mother's work? Or the work of a friend or colleague? Either way the notes suggest that these are actual recording scripts which have been used. A mystery!

I am not quite convinced of the merits of belonging to a family which never ever throws anything away if there is even the remotest chance that it will come in some day. On the other hand, I may end up single handedly dressing the display for the museum's autumn exhibition "Absolutely Prefab" with my large quantities of 1940s, 1950s and 1960s ephemera - well, not quite, but I do keep finding things to pass on to Jennifer who is in charge of this particular exhibition.

Now, a spot of advice from fellow amateur genealogists? Over the years - a great many years since my grandmother helped me draw up my first family tree when I was six - I have recorded my family history information in a variety of ways: do I keep all the various stages of my research, or just the final or best version? Obviously the two earliest versions - the tree Nan did for me, and the even earlier one her mother did for one of her grandchildren - are family documents in their own right, but is it worth keeping all the intermediate versions so that I can track the misconceptions and revisions as well as all the changes in technology?