In 1962, Bahiyyidin Barakat found himself embroiled in a legal dispute with his cousins Mustafa and Ali Amin, editors of a leading Egyptian newspaper. The twins had taken their elderly relative to court over the diaries of their mutual great-uncle, the 'father of the Egyptian nation,' Sa'd Zaghlul. The complex case might have been forgotten had it not unfolded at a time when an aggressive public campaign was being waged by the preeminent historian Muhammad Anis to appropriate private papers of public interest. Anis had Nasser's ear and the President decided to settle the cousins' bickering at once by issuing a declaration against 'hoarding documents of national importance'. Soon enough, Anis and other regime-aligned experts were dispatched to seize the diaries. They placed them in the National Archives, the newly-established launch pad for their campaign to 'rewrite Egyptian history'. The precedent-setting decree that Nasser issued would have far reaching consequences for history-writing. Rather than having the desired effect of bringing private papers into the public domain, it inevitably led to their concealment. Families who possessed documents potentially 'nationally important' hoarded them away, fearful that they might be seized. While the Zaghlul family were forced to hand over the documents deemed important by the gatekeepers of Egypt's past, they also managed to retain a great deal more. Spanning 1483 CE to 1962, those documents-genealogies, photographs, financial records, and letters-deemed unimportant remained in the hands of my family. I contend that such archival dregs, or papers of national unimportance, as my title suggests, can unsettle, enrich, and complicate the nationalist narratives carefully curated by state-sponsored historians. Although the Zaghlul family story is atypical it reveals something salient about the relationship between the state and its subjects: one in which the former has appropriated, monitored and narrated history in the name of 'the people' while simultaneously refusing to make it accessible to, or authorable by, them. I suggest that family history-a form of 'public history'-provides a platform for questioning the increasingly invasive laws that regulate relations between Egyptians and their pasts. Recent efforts to open up the national archives-to recover documents relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example-have failed. Instead, I suggest that the ostensibly 'apolitical' work of family history, requiring access to census records, endowment charters, and birth and death certificates might be instrumentalised: to demand a reclamation of our collective pasts.