Found some 60-70 year old negatives and 8mm film!

[csziggy]

14. Both my side and my husband's have saved lots of stuff

And members have been into genealogy for decades. We joke that my family never throws anything away - we have ledgers from my great grandfather both for his hardware store in Escanaba and for their home. Last year I found a small wallet with a little notebook in it that had notes about "money I took from home when I left 5 September 1812."

But no one has sorted this stuff or taken the time to preserve it. Some stuff we know that had been saved has been lost - a letter that went with a secretary made in the 1830s was chewed up by mice. That letter was from the man who had it commissioned to the newly wedded couple that owned it and passed it down in their family, so it was valuable provenance as well as a piece of history. The letter was still in existence in the 1950s when my grandmother bought the secretary from the original family but was lost since.

So I'm trying to archive and preserve as much as I can. Eventually I will begin working to donate the items to appropriate locations since no one in the family has the space or inclination to store it all.