Does anyone here do professional work in the family/estate archiving/organizing arena? My grandfather, 94, is dying of bone cancer and probably only has a few weeks left to live and my grandmother has dementia and will likely not live much longer than him. In their storage, they have over a dozen boxes of original family papers (letters, records, scrapbooks, diaries, military papers, official vital documents, you name it they have it) and photos (both in albums and just loose) - but *all* of it is in utter chaos and totally disorganized. It actually hurts me to open the boxes and look in them because of both the lack of order and the lack of decent care for these items - some of them date back to the early 1800s. (Why haven't these been sorted through and archived earlier? My grandmother is fiercely, fiercely protective of them and does not like anyone looking at them for fear of us taking them away from her or ruining them or losing them, etc. Her failing mental capacities have meant that for the past decade she's just been grasping at what she still has.) Now, though, suddenly everyone is in a panic about these photos and documents and what we will do with them and how we will identify them if my grandparents die. So they've enlisted me to help. This isn't the usual work that I do - normally I do research - but I would like to approach this in a way I would approach a paying client. I would like to give my family a proposal and a project plan. (They will be paying me for this.) My question is, how have others approached this kind of project? On what kind of timeline? With what kind of billing procedures? My plan right now, loosely, is to purchase a few dozen archival quality document and photo boxes and a few hundred polypropylene archival quality clear sheet protectors and start organizing everything, paper by paper, into family group. But how do I do this without getting totally bogged down? Do I start with the broad sorting triage and then go back to do citations and descriptions of individual documents? Do I create an index along the way? Difficulties I imagine encountering: unidentifiable documents and photos; documents that cross different family groups; sheer volume of material being too much to archive in individual sheet protectors; and I'm sure other difficulties I'm not yet imagining. Any words of wisdom in terms of project planning? Also could use some insight into billing for this - by the hour? How long should I imagine this might take? Should I bill in stages? (I.e., "Phase I" will bill this much, further phases billed separately?) Help! Thank you :) Eva