How long do you need to keep records after someone dies?

Answer 1

In simple language, you keep records after someone has died, forever. If you are lucky, a person after your death will find the records and discover that which occured which you knew and the deceased person knew, but was all lost when they died. Not just the personal events of the dead, but the whole of the culture. Your deceased was because you kept the records and somebody after you got them; the records tell the future as much as letters from the Civil War, in the United States of America, as letters from grandparents, dead for 50 years, tell their grandchildren who they were and how they felt about each other, and notes, and scrambled papers, and old documents, like those I discovered yesterday, actually, yesterday, that my father who died in 1965, and my mother who died in 1998 both produced with the help of an accountant in Atlanta or somewhere: documents from a 1958 joint income tax return. I was a high school senior when that tax return, and its supporting documents were filed. I knew nothing of the doucment. I found it in a pile of documents, piled in a room, and forgotten, but by a dead mother who never threw anything away. That, of my life, long gone in youth, retured. And the concern of my father, with burning tobacco barns, tomato plants planted, his feeling that he did not have funds to give me XXX dollars to go to the Grand Canyon became as clear and painful to me, now, as it was to him. then, fifty years ago. I pay taxes now; I know the costs of a family, and I would have never comprehended his view of the world, but for the records, just placed in a pile and a box, with a side falling off from age and glue and gravity. So the answer to your question: you keep records forever. Oh, if you are talking about record keeping for various legal purposes.... I'll have to get some sites for you. Frankly, records are forever.