For someone who wants to create heirlooms today, how would you go about it? Something sturdy and well made, but not so valuable that it’s tucked away into a box (like the Rolex in the article). The watch that I rock today (a smart watch) is well made but I don’t see it being useful in 50 years much less 20.
The item doesn't matter so much as the memories that get attached to it. If you want to do this through conscious effort, make sure to use the item frequently in activities that you do with whomever you intend to pass it on to.
Anecdotally, the things that are most likely to become multi-generation heirlooms are things like woodworking tools. They last forever with moderate care, and woodworking as a hobby or profession can also be passed from one generation to the next so that the tools will continue to be useful.
Stuff in general is a lot cheaper than it used to be, and there's been a kind of hollowing out of the middle - everyday-use things are cheap enough to be disposable, so almost by definition anything sturdy is likely too expensive to use. (If you look at medieval wills, even shirts or crockery were valuable enough to pass down; if you go back a few decades then everyday furniture was expensive enough that you would avoid buying new if you could).
The only things I can think of my friends having that are valuable enough to pass on without feeling "expensive for the sake of being expensive" are Patagonia jackets, and even then it's hard to imagine one of them becoming an heirloom - while they are well-made, the price is partly because of the cutting-edge materials which will likely become cheaper and more effective over time. (And Patagonia specifically seems to be headed in the Rolex direction of becoming a luxury brand).
A wall clock would be my suggestion, having inherited a couple of lovely ones myself.
Even though one of them is worth quite a lot of money, it's not like a watch where using it risks easily damaging it - it's mounted high enough on the wall that any visiting kids can't reach it, and while it's not quite as convenient as modern clocks I quite enjoy winding it every couple of weeks, and remembering to put it forward/back an hour a couple of times a year. Though it did cost a few hundred pounds to get it repaired a couple of years ago (which came with a side benefit of being shown around a local clock specialist's workrooms that must've had >100 clocks, some being built by him and his intern, some being repaired, some just being clocks).
And actually, I'm growing to slightly prefer the other clock which is the one my mum learned the time on as a kid - it's a cuckoo clock with two chains and removable weights, one chain needs daily pulling to power it, the other chain is usually not in use but when you hang the weight on it the cuckoo is powered and comes out / makes a noise once on the half hour, and on the hour it does as many as the value of the hour. Shame it runs about 5mins fast per day, but I'm too lazy to think about fixing it and it's a quirk that I don't mind.
A similar heirloom is a painting, which again has the benefit of being enjoyed (it's on the wall I face at my home PC desk) with minimal chance of damage. I'm lucky enough that it's got some real family history to it - my great, great grandfather (or was it 3x great, I forget) had it commissioned and it shows the ship he owned, at sea. Was very relieved a couple of years ago when a relative doing family research was able to finally confirm that the ship was never used in the slave trade which had always been a worry in the back of our minds (though given the world back then, it wouldn't be a huge surprise if some of the spices it transported between various parts of the world and the UK had involved slavery / other immoral acts to acquire, but still pleased my family were never involved in nor 'owned' any slaves.)
- a reproduction of Thos. Jefferson's Lap Desk in bamboo
- a collection of woodworking and machinist tools which I need to make a nicer case for, probably one modeled on the H.O. Studley tool cabinet, though I've been debating making a nice set of drawings from the typo-ridden book and making a replica of that
- the Spellbinder deck box which has my first Magic: The Gathering deck in it, which includes a play set of Tropical Islands
- a collection of books on type and typesetting which includes some of the more interesting books I did the composition on, or assisted with in some way which warranted my being mentioned
- a collection of fantasy and science fiction books, including pretty much everything J.R.R. Tolkien wrote: https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienbooks/comments/sfi4qp/over_4... (his translation of the Exodus poem really, really needs to be reprinted, ideally w/ a lengthy scholarly examination) as well as pretty much everything Michael Moorcock wrote in paperback, as well as some other authors, either in hardcover or paperback.
and as mentioned else thread, there are a couple of more traditional heirlooms I have of my forebears (milk jug, lawnmower, my father's Seiko which unfortunately has a broken date wheel and is too large for my wrist/taste anyway), and one which I don't have which I still rage about (anvil).
That is pretty hard. I can't think anything off the top of my head that I would actually want as inheritance from my parents. It is all just stuff.
My mother has some old glass-ware she has kept in the cupboard for decades that were her inheritance from her grandmother or something, but we've checked and it is not worth anything it is just set of old cups and have definitely not been used for decades.
My father has a collection of some coins, but they are just something he used to collect when he did traveling in the 80s. Not really an heirloom or something I will be keep collecting - maybe if it has some monetary value I might keep the collection intact since I am not scrapped for cash.
Honestly, the answer is a Rolex (or another mechanical watch) that you actually wear. A lesson my father taught me was that things were made to be used; the Rolex in this article is just an asset, not a watch.
That, or another piece of jewelry is an obvious place to start. Essentially, anything that has utility, and you use it for that task.
I bet the scrapbooks people could give helpful advice.
I don't think you should worry about usefulness at all. It's impossible to say what you have that will be useful to your grandchildren, but probably not very much.
