Dealing with Dad’s watch collection.

Morgan, the tour leader from Antarctica, Iceland and Greenland, was in Melbourne on his 40th birthday, so we met up for dinner. He was coming back from a tour in the South Pacific and heading to Japan to see Babymetal in concert for the 9th or 10th time.

I brought some birthday candles with me. It was lovely to catch up with him again.

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started sorting through my father’s watch collection. These pocket watches were found at their house in a hiding place after we thought we’d retrieved all the watches last year.

Sadly, these 15 watches only scratch the surface of how many he had. Some of them are quite beautiful, like this one:

… but the sheer volume of items is overwhelming. This, of course, is why it’s taken over a year since his death before Kate, my sister, and I have tackled it.

I started it on my own, soon found it was horrible, but when Kate sat down with me, we worked through things together. This makes things move more quickly.

Around 5 or 6 years ago, Dad was asked to make a list of the watches that were valuable, so we’d know which ones were worth selling when he was gone. He made the list, and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Oh, how naive we were.

Have a look at just half of one page. A copy watch from Bali is documented alongside a watch worth nearly 2K. These worthless watches were stored away with just as much care as the valuable ones.

That’s my first problem.

My next one is that, although the list is numbered, there is no corresponding number attached to the actual watches. There’s no photo. All we have is the list and hundreds of watches. If we’re lucky, there’s a serial number on the back of the watch that he’s thought to put in his description. We raise a cheer whenever that happens.

Each identified watch, along with a note summarising Dad’s description on his list, is placed in a ziplock bag. Dad was careful to keep the original boxes for many of the watches… but they were all empty. He preferred to display many of the watches to show them off. I’ve got a garbage bag under the table in my sewing room full of these boxes. I’m hoping that the auction place will be able to guess which box goes with which watch.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of watches with serial numbers that are not on the list – and that’s just the wristwatches. There are many watches that might be worth something… or they might not be.

We haven’t begun to tackle the pocket watches. So far I’ve had 3 full days going through them. Kate has been once and is coming back today.

Part of the problem in our situation is that Dad’s decline was so unexpected. One fall, and he was whisked away to hospitals and then to the nursing home, and he never set foot in his house again. Making sure that his watch collection was easily sorted didn’t seem to be an urgent priority before all of this happened.

My advice for those readers with elderly parents who are collectors?

Sure, do what we did and get the items documented. Specify that any worthless items are best left off the list. Then, make sure each item is matched with the list in some way. Photos, tags, stickers… whatever. Do this before the collector is gone.

Already, Kate and I have spent many hours on this, and there’ll be DAYS and DAYS of sorting before us before we can take the watches to be valued and sold.

It could have been so easy.

Dad joke of the day: