The Finnish diplomat Harri Holma and his wife Alli, along with their son, art historian Klaus, created a private collection of 554 items. They acquired antique pieces and works of art in Berlin, Paris and Rome from the 1920s to the 1950s. The collection consists of Western and Southern European paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles and tableware, dating from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Initially the objects were acquired by the Holmas to decorate diplomatic residences, but eventually they came to form a deliberately assembled collection. Following Klaus’s death, Harri and Alli Holma donated the collection to the Lahti City Museum in the 1950s and the 1960s. Here the creation of the collection is first traced then followed on its journey to Finland, with a focus on the developing relationship between objects, family history and museum institution. The shifts in the collection’s narrative from hobby to an expression of grief, and finally to a formal museum assemblage and a subject of academic research generate epistemological tensions.