What Unusual Items Did You Find Going Through Your Deceased Relative's Belongings?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Speaking of beautiful, that’s one of the more beautiful things I’ve read around here in quite a while. I hope your great aunt was alive to appreciate that secret aspect of his love for her.

My finding, on my grandfather’s death, isn’t too weird but I think it’s a bit unusual these days: a file labeled “In the event of my death.” Nothing elaborate or strange, just basic instructions on funeral selections and well wishes, etc. The pallbearers he had selected were all still living, so we were able to fulfill that last request.

22

Not so strange, but from when my father died.

  1. He wasn’t the journal type, but for several months after his long term lover (James) died he kept a journal. All the entries were to James telling him about how his day went, how he’d see things he’d like, how he missed hearing his voice, ect. No entries were dated, but I pieced together the time frame based on events.

After my father died, I made one last entry to him in it. The book has since been wrapped in canvas, tied, and placed in a sealed box in storage labeled “family items”.

  1. A note was left which had my fathers wishes. One was to give his problematic car to the family mechanic as a gift. (the mechanic was always at my father to sell the car because it was junk,. but my father never would because it reminded him of James.)

  2. We did find porn, but we expected to find that. :wink:

23

Watches.

And more watches.

And then, some . . . watches.

We always knew that my dad had to have a watch. He didn’t like the digital kinds, he liked the ones with the hands. Once, several years before his death, my mom and I both got those fancy digital watches. He didn’t say much, but he seemed so disapproving and disappointed that we’d gotten digital watches. He cared far too much about what kind of watches we’d gotten. I mean really, why would he care?

And a while later, when I got a watch with the hands on it, he seemed keenly interested in that, and seemed so pleased that I’d gotten it. Once again, what? It seemed so odd. It mattered just a little too much.

But that was the only hint that I’d had that he had a thing for watches. So imagine our surprise when we found a “secret” drawer in which were at least 20 watches, still in their cases, often with receipts included. These were not super-fancy watches, but they weren’t cheapo Timex ones either. Most cost a couple hundred each. I doubt that any of them were under a hundred dollars. And there were about twenty of them.

This was unusual indeed for a man who was very thrifty and practical about money. It must have been some sort of compulsion that he had, to keep buying them. My theory is that he was so afraid that they’d phase out the “good” watches (the old fashioned ones with the hands) and replace them with those evil digital watches. So he wanted to stock up on the good watches, the ones that had he hands. And he got carried away.

We decided to give everyone in the family a watch or two. Then we gave the rest of the watches to my dad’s buddies at work. Something to remember him by. I thought that was pretty cool.

Other weird (but not unexpected) finds were: old glasses, without lenses. Our baby teeth. Old street car and train tickets. Schedules for the street cars. (They phased out the street cars in the early '60s in L.A. and he never got over it.) All his accounting books from childhood up. (Like I said, very thrifty and practical with money.) Lots of cool sentimental stuff like letters and such.

But the watches still take the cake!

24

My Grandmother did the same thing…My mom found various bills stashed in books, boxes, and even rolled up and stuffed into small nic nacs and figurines. It was a smaller amount than that, mostly in five and ten dollar bills.

I knew she was a writer, I didn’t know how detailed she was until I was given the contents of her filing cabinet…I found copies of all of the short stories she had sent to various magazines over the years, along with the clippings from said magazines, and, a small book listing everything she sent; to whom, date sent, accepted/rejected (including letters sent back from the companies), amount paid to her, ect.

She and my grandfather traveled after he retired. They drove across the country (San Bernadino California to New York), and she kept a running record of each trip they took, then came home and put together a notebook of the trip. Each book had matchbooks, coasters, placemats from restaraunts (with details of what they ate and how much they paid at each stop), motel receipts. She listed how many miles they traveled each day, gas milage, weather conditions, and details about what they saw, including her personal comments on the people (which showed me that she was rather uppity and prejudiced against blacks and mexicans) The first notebook is from 1962…
the last one was from the seventies (there are 8 notebooks, each in 3" binders) Detailing travels to Alaska, Hawaii, Norway, and all over the United States. It was neat going thru them for me…helped me get to know her better in a way.

25

Seven - What your father did was one of the most touching things I have ever read… Your father and James must have been a wonderful couple…

Thanks for sharing it

26

When my great aunt died, we discovered a box labeled with my grandmother’s name (she died 20 years ago). In it were a number of deeply personal items, including photos of her with a fiance she’d had before WWII (prior to my grandfather), love letters sent to my grandfather while he was overseas at varous points in his naval career, etc. Our best guess is when she was dying, she asked her sister to go over to her house and remove certain items she was embarassed to have her children see.

We also found, in my great aunt’s personal things, about a dozen photos taken inside a concentration camp in europe (the bodies were all wearing the striped uniform). Several shots are of piles of bodies, and you can see American soldiers wandering about in the background of some. There were also a few photos of solders in a muddy campground. We don’t recognize any of the men. We don’t know who sent her these photos (a boyfriend?), or why she kept them all these years. It was quite a shock going through the stack. . .grandmom and great aunt in a dinner with sailors. . . soldiers mugging at the camera. . . great-granddad washing his Studebaker. . . pit of bodies. . .woah! I dropped the stack all over the floor.

A friend of mine from college found $15,000 stuffed in the couch cusions after her great aunt died. My dad has a customer who found thousands worth of gold coins sewn into the hem of a skirt in her mother’s attic. This seems to be a trend among people of a certain age.

27

My grandmother (father’s mother) was a packrat. She would keep most anything, for reasons that were difficult for anyone else to understand. When she was hit by a car in a crosswalk, she ended up in a nursing home for about 8 months. While she was there, my father and I went down to her place to sort through her apartment, and do something about the cockroach problem she had. (Mind you, according to her it was all the fault of those people living in the building with her.) We found all sorts of things that boggled us:

The bottle of Maneschewitz gefilte fish, which had turned green. Not on the outside, but inside.

The six pack of Schlitz beer. Which was about half full, because the bottle caps had rusted and no longer sealed the bottles.

The fifteen boxes of macaroni and cheese. My grandmother kept kosher, and neither my father nor I could figure out why she had those, other than they had to have been a good price.

Approximately 20 cans of tunafish, and my father was boggled by this because he knew for a fact she hated tunafish.

A cigar from a dance at the Jewish home dating to the 1930’s. No other signifigance to it that we could see, just a souvenir that had been kept and kept and kept…

The only interesting papers that were found was her collection of the sermon notes of a Rabbi she had worked with at the temple for many years. But they were only interesting in an academic way: Nothing in them relating to people I knew, nor very incisive.

Now, my other grandmother, when she passed away, had an astonishing collection of ‘naughty’ sculptures (The sort where a figure was standing in a barrel, and when the barrel was removed the ‘tits’ or ‘penis’ of the figurine would jump to attention. Most of them made from mahogony or teak.) that got me, my parents, and my aunt and uncle giggling terribly when we realized what they were, finally, after all these years of seeing them on her knick-knack shelves without realizing the secrets they held.

28

My grandparents lived in the same house for 70 years. I missed the big attic clean out but was there for the cleanup after my grandfather died. They had a kitchen with cupboards that ran from counter hieght all the way up to the 9 foot ceilings. Needless to say some of those top cupboards hadn’t been accessed in a LONG time.

One really cool thing we found was a box of sugar cubes with little piped colored decoration on each one. Some had birds, some had flowers, etc. On examining the box we found a date. It must have been 1985-6 that we did the cleaning. The date on the box was 1921.

29

“You can take a boy out of the Depression…but you can’t take the Depression out of the boy.”

Preach it, brother. My mother and father were both raised during the Depression and have already told my brothers and me NOT to start throwing stuff out willy-nilly after they die - they’ve secreted money all over the house. Unfortunately, after my mother’s stroke they seem to have forgotten where it is. We’re now faced with having to leaf through a library of several hundred volumes and magazines going back 30+ years once they shuffle off this mortal coil. Not to mention all the drawers, clothes pockets, boxes, cans, etc etc etc.

Note to self: When I start hiding my money, make a map. It’ll make everything so much easier for Lilly, Queen of the Universe.

And the story about the empty bottles of hand lotion is a classic.

30

The watches reminded me of two stories that happened to friends of mine.

  1. They found over 30 sets of small tweezers scattered throughout the house of an elderly parent. All of them cheap like you would get for less than $5 in a drug store. She must have kept misplacing them and buying new ones.

  2. My good friend’s father died in his 60’s. The found a couple dozen unopened three packs of underwear that appeared to be several years old. There must have been one hell of a sale one day. His father was a rather large man so they didn’t fit anyone in the family. In retrospect, they should have handed them out to everyone who was close to him like the watches. :smiley:

Haj

31

Let’s see:

I got my grandfather’s two pocketknives and his easy chair. That was all I asked for. As for unusual things that I found when helping to go through his house:

A collection of vintage erotica (stag style) that looked like it had been purchased when new. In my grandmother’s closet, I found a collection of vintage bondage and S&M novels that, oddly enough, looked like they had been written with a submissive female audience in mind (my, oh, my).

My grandfather’s complete WWII service record, plus his decorations. His original driver’s license. A gasoline credit tag.

The complete abstract of title for his house, which, in great detail, began with the settlement of the area in “pre-historic” times as far as was known in the 1950s and took everything all the way up to his purchase. Alas, that is no longer done, today, so I’m having to assemble one myself for my own property.

32

I hope she did too, masonite, but we’ll never know. I didn’t get them until she’d passed away and there was no way to tell if she’d known about them specifically. The good news is he was one of those quiet, truly loving men that practically radiated how much he adored her. More than sixty very happy years together.

33

The weirdest thing about that was that, after living in that house for 30+ years my Mother-in-Law, B-i-L, and Lady Chance had no idea that he’d done it.

We found one envelope. Then another. Then another.

My B-i-L and I spent an entire weekend detailed to tearing the place apart while my wife and her mother cleaned up and prepared for the yard sale. I’m still, in my heart-of-hearts hoping we sold something and made someone’s day.

I quote Lady Chance: “If I’d known there was $10,000 hidden away my high school years would have been MUCH more fun.”

34

Not exactly weird, but when I was going through my grandmother’s possessions after she died, I came across a very old blue handkerchief, neatly folded and tucked away in the bottom corner of a linen drawer. With some inspection, one could make out a grouping of pinholes in the center and some creasing, as if it had been bunched up.

My mother and I like to think this was the “something blue” part of grandma’s wedding gown & that it had been discretely pinned somewhere just inside the dress. It’s plausible enough and that bit of cloth had to have held some sentimental value - and it continues to do so, as it’s now tucked away in my mother’s drawer.

35

I helped a buddy clean up his grandfathers house several years back. Didn’t find any porn (dang!). But when we pulled back the carpet (We were replacing it, not snooping) the whole entire livingroom floor was lined with old newspapers from the 20s and 30s. The most vivid one to mind was “Hitler Invades Czechslvokia”.

36

A slight tangent on the squirreled-away money topic:
The original owners of our house had converted the basement into an apartment for one of their daughters and her husband. That daughter and her husband eventually moved upstairs when her parents died, and one of her sons lived in the basement apartment till we bought the house.
It was five rooms, all done in knotty pine paneling that was very dark and terribly mildewed.
We started tearing it down (to make the basement into a family room and storage area), and kept finding odd little nooks and crannies between the walls. The strangest ones were between the paneling and the outside cinder block walls - definite hidey-holes down about a foot off floor level, with hidden openings in corners.
Tearing it all down suddenly became really fun. My husband was convinced we were going to find a stash of cash or stock certificates. We never did find anything, but when we mentioned it to a neighbor, she nodded and said it (hiding money or jewlery) sounded like something they would have done.

We also found an broken upright vacuum cleaner in the attic. This is a small low-ceilinged attic, accessible by an opening in the hallway ceiling - and there’s no pull-down steps; we have to use a ladder. Why on Earth would you drag a broken vacuum up a ladder to the attic?

37

When my grandmother died, we found hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of newspaper rubber bands.
Balls of rubber bands lurked in every closet and cranny.

We also found a tiny lady’s pale pink bedroom slipper, inside of which was a tiny pistol.

Granny had a gun!

Her sons had no idea.

Considering that she had Alzheimers before her death, bless her heart, I’m sure she no longer knew either.

38

By the way, surreal…

Great topic!
:slight_smile:

39

Grandma’s hip.

No, really. We were going through Mr. Furthur’s grandmother’s house when she was placed in a nursing home shortly before her death. Looked up on a shelf in the basement and there was a shoebox neatly labeled “Grace’s hip.” We got it down. Lo & behold, there was a metal hip joint inside.

She’d had an accident in the 1950s which shattered her original hip, and they replaced it with a metal one, which she subsequently had replaced in the 1980s. The theory was that, tight-fisted lady that she was, she demanded the old metal one back because she’d bought and paid for it.

Other gems: her husband’s parachute from WWII (wish we’d kept that). The varnished lower 4 inches of tree trunk from every Christmas tree they’d had for 30 years. The original metal tin of baby powder Grandma had received when giving birth to her one & only daughter in 1947. Grandma & Grandpa’s first TV set.

But the best, of course, was the hip. It currently reposes in our toy room, still in its original box. Eventually I plan to move it to the attic, where my children can find it when they’re cleaning out our house after we die. And who knows? Maybe we’ll have collected a few body parts from other family members to go with it. :smiley:

40

Oh, and best part of the hip story:

On the way home from Grandma’s house, we had a blowout on the highway. We open the trunk and start looking for a jack.

My husband: “I think that’s the jack right there.”

Me, hushed voice: “No, honey, that’s the hip.”

Priceless. :wink: