I hope he gets back on his feet, quite literally, soon! I know I'd end up with all the family pictures. At least on my mom's side. My dad, I'm less certain. He's been scanning some. I hope he's done a lot of them! The LF (little fella) (not so little any more. He's finally more than 100 pounds, and taller than 5 feet) is not doing anything. Hence, my disappointment. Boo on him! He did make and sell $100 worth of jewelry. He won't even do that anymore. He skipped out on selling discount books (those sell like hotcakes every year), local grocery cards, fruit, candy... all of it. All he has to do is show up with the jewelry, and my friends/family will buy it. The weirdest part of that is, he wanted to start his own "business" with it? He even had a leger he was keeping. He has supplies. He likes to do it. So what gives? Dunno. Haven't overcome that obstacle yet.

The view cards may be worth more than the viewer if scenes of historic interest are recorded. For example, my family also has a steroscope that was sold through a catalog by Sears Roebuck & Co. It dates to about 1905. We have card no.1 - Mr. Sears at his desk! And what a messy desk it was with an old time telephone. His office looked like a back room in a dry goods store. We do not have a complete set which would be extensive. Some of our cards are numbered in the 1700s. We have a few cards with scenes of the Klondike gold rush. These cards may or may not have a high market value, but they have value to me and therefore are not for sale. One special card is a stero view of the moon made by Mr. Rutherford himself. It explains on the back of the card how the shot was made.

Jane, why would people throw up over using coasters? I have several nice sets (mostly from ebay), including some stone ones with fossils in them, hand-carved wood, tooled leather, miniature Oriental rugs. It gets so humid here in the summer that a beverage glass will sweat a big puddle all over a table, and the hot mugs we slurp from all winter long make nasty marks on wood, and the rough bottoms of handthrown pottery can scratch something fierce. DH pretty much wrecked the top of his ~150yo Victorian nightstand leaving a cup of hot coffee on the unprotected surface, I could have killed him because now I'm going to have to fix it. (I had glass tops cut for them when I first bought them, but I hate the "clank" sound of something like a glass or mug being put down on a glass surface, and that glass is a dust magnet.) Most of our tables are antique in the sense of "old stuff" rather than "valuable" but it doesn't mean I still think it's okay to trash them. I'm not one of those people who scurries around sticking coasters under people's drinks when we have people over though, that's just rude IMO.

My cousin called me one day last August to "come get whatever you want out of your mother's storage building, because the rent's up at the end of the month." My brothers, their wives, & my cousin had already been through it: My mother's sister (my cousin's mother) hadn't been up to sifting through stuff at the time: she was in her mid-seventies, she was recovering from a virus, it was August in Texas, & the storage building was a metal structure on a concrete slab. So I went down & started going through things. About an hour into my explorations, I called my cousin & asked him to get his mother to meet me at the building. The things that were left were *mostly* trash & junk, but I knew there was some reason that some of that stuff had been kept all these years. I had a box for myself, a box to take to my mother's church for their kitchen, & a box for trash. When my aunt arrived, I showed her the books I'd started tossing into the trash. She was aghast: "This is Mama's geometry book!" Her mother, my grandmother, was a pioneer: She had graduated from high school in an era when most girls dropped out in about the 8th grade & helped out at home until they married. Back then, you had to pay for your own schoolbooks. This book had her name in the front, & her pencilled notes in the margins. and there were a couple of more of her books in there, too. So those books had been passed down & passed around for about 70 years, & my brothers, my brothers' wives, & my cousin, not knowing that they were, had left them for me to probably throw in the trash. Thank goodness I called my aunt! She kept the schoolbooks. When she, as she puts it, "can no longer enjoy them", my cousin is to be sure that they go to her brother or to one of us cousins or another descendant. Since my brother now has a grandson, the books could one day belong to the original owner's great-great-grandchild.