Cleaning out an old family farmhouse is an exercise in conundrums. As you sift through all the stuff, you have to constantly ask yourself, “keep or crap?”

Many of the decisions are easy. It’s unlikely that anyone will want a yellowed feed store calendar from 2013. Ditto for the rubber over boots that have more holes than a standard slice of Swiss cheese.

But other things aren’t quite so easy to categorize. Back in the corner of a dresser drawer, I stumbled across a tattered paperback book that delineated, in excruciating detail, In the lineage of the Ruen family.

I was vaguely aware that I’m distantly related to the Ruens, so I flipped through the tome. It contains a mind-numbing number of filial offshoots and side shoots. I recognized the name Eggebraaten – Grandma Hammer was an Eggebraaten – so I perused that section with some interest.

The book relates how my Eggebraaten ancestors left Norway in 1849 aboard a sailing ship. Their Atlantic crossing would take more than a month. Passengers weren’t allowed to board the ship unless they could prove that they were bringing along enough food to last the voyage. The story reports that conditions belowdecks were less than ideal and mentions the names of family members who expired from such things as dysentery or cholera during the journey.

I wonder what they would think of modern cruise ships with their 24-hour, all-you-can-eat food troughs?

In addition to “keep or crap,” a third category is “donate to Goodwill.” If you want to be fancy, you could call it “upcycling,” an alternative term for stuff that I don’t need or want but seems too good to join the local landfill.

Hanging behind a bedroom door were several formal dresses that had been worn by my sisters during the 1970s and 1980s. I snapped a photo of the dresses and sent it to my sisters and asked if they would like to reclaim them. Curiously, they all said no. A few days later, a shopper at Goodwill probably couldn’t believe her good luck at finding a bevy of vintage formal dresses.

My nephew Adam lived with my mother for several years when he was in high school. As I dug through his former digs, I found several old black-and-white photos. One was of an Inuit family, while another featured a group of igloos. Scribbled on the back of the igloo photo was “April 1948. This is the igloo where I stayed.”

The pictures were a total mystery to me, an enigma that begged to be unraveled. I snapped a photo of the pictures and texted it to Adam. He replied that the pictures had belonged to Victor, his father’s father. When he was 21, Victor had spent a spring and summer living with an Inuit family. The snapshots memorialized the event.

“There used to be a kayak too,” Adam added in his reply. His mother, Janet, passed away a few years ago, so I couldn’t ask her about it.

I’d never heard of this kayak; it was news to me. It felt delicious to noodle on this puzzle.

A few days later, my wife and I did lunch with my sister Jane, Janet’s twin. I mentioned the photos and the mystery of the kayak and she replied, “Oh, I have the kayak.”

It turned out that Jane had acquired the kayak during the process of moving Janet into assisted living. “It’s just sitting on a shelf, gathering dust,” Jane said. We quickly agreed that the kayak needed to be sent to Adam.

Jane went to her house and soon returned with the item that lay at the core of the mystery. The model kayak is about three feet long and is clearly handmade. It’s covered with sealskin and includes a two-bladed oar, a harpoon, and a spear. It appears that bone and walrus tooth were used to make the points of the spear and the harpoon.

It was one of the coolest relics that I had ever seen. Holding it made me feel connected to Victor, whom I had only met once, briefly. Adam’s father had told me that Victor and his wife, JoAnn, were born in Poland and had emigrated to Canada when they were young, eventually settling in Ontario.

I wondered what impelled young Victor to spend a spring and summer in the Arctic. How had he connected with the Inuit family in that pre-internet era? And if there had been an internet, what sort of connection speed would they have had that far north?

These mysteries may remain unsolved. But the artefacts are now in the hands of Adam and his children, and they can decide “keep or crap?”

— Jerry’s book, “Dear County Agent Guy” can be found at www.workman.comand in bookstores nationwide.