Cyrano4747 posted:

Same advice, except skip the neighborhood library and go to your local University of State library. The research librarian there will certainly know what's what about this sort of thing, can almost certainly help you with this themselves, and if they can't should 100% be able to put you in contact with someone reasonably near by who can. They're generally really cool about helping members of the general public with this sort of thing, and if they aren't the majority of state university libraries have an option to become a non-student lending member for something nominal like $20/year.

By way of an example I just picked a state at random - Arkansas - googled up the UofA's list of librarians, and hit this: list of librarians there by subject. If you were in Arkansas I'd say to write the one specializing in history a polite email explaining your project and how you want to preserve the documents your grandfather left. If that person wasn't the perfectly correct person to contact they're not going to poo poo on you, just forward you to the person in their universe who does take care of that stuff.

Research librarians really can get excited about stuff like this, you're probably going to get more traction than with the nice lady who has to deal with keeping hobos from masturbating in front of the kids there for Harry Potter.