The wristwatch Grandpa wore every day is just a watch to anyone else. To you it’s every day he wore it.

Objects carry meaning only for the people who watched them being used. A valuer sees a mechanism and a strap; you see a wrist at a kitchen table, one particular morning, the sound of it being set down. None of that is in the object, and all of it is attached to the object, which is why inheritance is so hard to explain to anybody else.

Write down on paper what the thing means and who it belonged to, then keep the note with it. In two generations it goes back to being a watch unless somebody who knew the story bothered to record it.