Ask the Museum Girl

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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[QUOTE=Lissa]
(People never think we’ll be interested in “modern” items, so they don’t think to donate them.
We really don’t like to borrow. It’s stressful-- we have to worry about getting all of the items back to their owners and we have to be even more careful than usual. If we scratched an item of our own, it would be a tragedy, but God help us if we dented someone’s football trophy.

[/QUOTE]

You’ll take old trophies? Because I’ve thrown stuff like that out. I’m actually serious because I know when my father goes he’ll have lots of trophies, plaques and things like that. I am not going to know what to do with them.

So what kinds of things will you not take? I have some things I’d get rid of but don’t know who to take them to. It’s too bad I didn’t know this when my mother died as I had to pay someone to sell it for me and I could of had someone come in and take the good stuff and gotten rid of the rest.

42

[QUOTE=Edward The Head]
You’ll take old trophies? Because I’ve thrown stuff like that out. I’m actually serious because I know when my father goes he’ll have lots of trophies, plaques and things like that. I am not going to know what to do with them.
[/quote]

Yes and no. I was speaking in context of the 1946 class reunion exhibit.

But we do take trophies, plaques and awards. Several factors come into play: 1) Was the person prominent in our community? 2) Do we have similar items already? 3) Were the awards “important” to our area?

What you should do is call your local historical society and ask them.

“We’re Half the Distance to the Dump”, remember? We’ll take just about anything as long as we have space for it and we don’t already have similar items in our collections. (Exceptions are made for prominent individuals or if the item has particular significance to local history.)

We look at an item and try to ask what significance this would have to people of the future. Does it say anything particular about the time period? Is it likely that many of these items will survive? Does it say anything about the way people lived at the time, or about a particular individual?

We take clothes, books, electronics, household items, items from local businesses, recreational items, medical items . . . pretty much anything. Take a look around you right now and the things you see in the room around you are the things we have in our collection.

We* love *diaries, letters, photographs and other personal items like that. The jackpot is when someone donates an item along with a photo of them using it and maybe a letter or diary entry mentioning it.

We have had people invite us to come out and look through an estate to see if there’s anything we want to take. In one example, we took an entire living-room suit which dated to about 1950 (wonderfully tacky!) that had belonged to an old lady who had died and her kids didn’t want any of her stuff.

43

You’ve mentioned before donations like a dress with a zipper, which the donator claimed was made before zippers existed. I’ve been wondering for a while whether or not it’s possible that such a dress was sewn with buttons, and rehabbed with a zipper later. I imagine that even if that was the case, the historical value has been significantly reduced, but I’m curious what other clues you use to date clothing.

44

[QUOTE=Beadalin]
You’ve mentioned before donations like a dress with a zipper, which the donator claimed was made before zippers existed. I’ve been wondering for a while whether or not it’s possible that such a dress was sewn with buttons, and rehabbed with a zipper later. I imagine that even if that was the case, the historical value has been significantly reduced, but I’m curious what other clues you use to date clothing.
[/QUOTE]

Well, in that particular case, the donor was claiming that the dress was made in about 1800, when her great-great-great-great grandmother married.

The seams were machine sewn-- they didn’t have sewing machines back then. The style of the gown screamed c. 1900-- a high collar (with boning) and the sleeve style was all wrong for the time period.

We look at things like that-- the style, the colors used (the type of dyes, vegetable or chemical) the spacing and location of buttons, the type of cloth, the style of trimmings, etc. You can tell when a gown has been re-cut or re-styled because the ghosts of former seams and folds linger.

And for our purposes, we would not consider a gown to have lost its significance if it’s been re-styled. On the contrary, we would find it interesting for that reason. It’s a good teaching tool and it tells us about household economy at the time. It might not be as valuable to a commercial collector, but we don’t think along those lines. We think about what the piece tells us about the people who used it.