Heritage starts with what individuals inherit and bequeath. Along with the national legacy cited in Chapter 1, Heritage Canada offers an evocative personal inventory:

Lineal linkage justifies holding on to possessions; to keep all we gain may seem selfish, but to keep what we inherit is a family duty, binding us in a chain of caretakers. An heirloom is, as the word suggests, a device for interweaving generations. Nowadays heirlooms smack of things folkloric or outworn—Penelope's plaiting and unraveling, an obsolete tool, an ornament that was once an amulet. They may seem mere frills or encumbrances. Yet we continue to treasure and transmit things and thoughts handed down to us, tokens of times remembered and of lives linked with ours.

Material bequests are commonly likened to offspring. “I love them with a passion, and I want them to stay together after I'm gone,” said Walter Annenberg of the Old Master paintings he gave New York's Metropolitan Museum in 1991, chiding would-be Japanese buyers for “asking me to sell members of my family.” Selling a family portrait is censured as unfilial in a Henry James tale; “respectable people don't lop off the branches” of their family trees. Offspring themselves are our most enduring legacies.