I have found that it’s difficult to clean out an ancestral farmhouse when history keeps getting in the way. Especially when it’s my family’s history.

After delaying the chore for far too long, I have thrown myself into clearing out the home where my seven siblings and I grew up. A house that was built by our homesteading ancestors and is freighted with more than a century’s worth of memories.

Deciding what to toss and what to keep is taking longer than the actual act of cleaning.

Here’s a black-and-white photo of my Norwegian immigrant great-great uncles, Jens and Ole Nelson, standing proudly in front of the house when it was fairly new. A bevy of their extended family is on the porch, including my great-great-grandmother Ingeborg and my grandmother Elida. Elida, who was born in 1893, was about seven years old at the time.

I stumbled across a teacher’s contract that my mother signed in 1953. Mom agreed to teach grades one through eight in a one-room country school for the princely sum of $1,890 for the year.

A hymnal — written in Norwegian and printed in an unreadable Gothic font — caught my eye. A handwritten inscription inside reads, “Miss Elida Nelson, fra Moder. April 30, 1912.”

In a far corner of a closet, I found a forgotten shoebox that was stuffed with old papers. And a bullet.

The bullet is a round from a 20-millimeter antiaircraft cannon. This bratwurst-sized projectile is memento of Dad’s time as a gunner aboard the battleship USS Washington during WW II.

The bullet has some markings on it, so I Googled them to see what they mean. The projectile, which was manufactured in June of 1943, could be either highly explosive or highly incendiary. I thought, “Holy crap! I better not drop this thing!”

But the bullet is also painted green, when means that it’s an inert practice round. Dad would never knowingly endanger his family, so that figures.

In the box was a pamphlet of illustrations to help sailors identify Japanese, German, and Italian warships. It’s probably a good idea to know who you’re targeting.

A set of Navy documents caught my eye. They were the forms that a guy would fill out if he wanted to become a naval aviator. I had no idea that Dad had entertained that particular notion. But he lacked one crucial qualification, namely, a high school diploma. Dad quit school after the eighth grade.

An astonishing find lurked at the bottom of the box: a yellow and tattered old newspaper, as fragile as a spiderweb.

The newspaper is the December 13, 1945, edition of the Southern Daily Echo. It was published in Southampton, England and was priced at three half-pence.

This souvenir is a reminder that Dad remained in the Navy for several months after the war ended. He helped convert the Washington into a troopship that was used to ferry U.S. servicemen from England to New York.

The paper’s banner headline commands attention: “HITLER’S ORDER FOR 4,000,000 SLAVES” with a subhead that reads “Brutality and Terror Were To Be Their Lot.”

The Nuremburg Trials were ongoing at the time. The Nazis who were in charge of Hitler’s war machine had kept scrupulous records, including the minutes of a conference held in January of 1944 wherein der Führer demanded the acquisition of several million additional slaves. American prosecutor Thomas Dodd stated that the Nazis used brutality and terror to maximize production from their slave laborers. In direct conflict with the rules of war, Allied POWs were forced to work in German munitions plants and even take part in military operations against their own countries.

Below the fold, next to the story recounting all those horrors, is a gauzy ad for Rowntree’s Cocoa, which, it says, “soothes frayed nerves.” I bet there was a big demand for that.

At the top right corner of the front page is a small article titled, “Dachau Camp Sentences” with a subhead of “Death Penalty in 36 Cases.”

Some forty Nazis who had operated the Dachau concentration camp were convicted of a variety of war crimes and causing the deaths of more than 30,000 people. Fritz Hintermeyer, one of the camp’s doctors, was found guilty of killing more than 900 people with the medical experiments he conducted for the German Air Force.

Sandwiched between those two dreary stories is a photo of excited children meeting Father Christmas in a London store. A bit of badly needed leavening to offset all the heavy stuff.

We might think that we’re living in crazy times, but the times have always been crazy. I’m discovering that the key is figuring out which to toss and which to keep.

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