Stumbled on a 100 year old time capsule in my aunt's attic last Saturday

I was up at my aunt's place near Albany last Saturday helping her clean out the attic before they do a roof repair. She mentioned a old wooden box her grandfather left up there sometime around 1920. I figured it was probably just junk, but I pried the lid open and found a stack of letters, a pocket watch that still ticks, and a dried flower pressed between two pages of a Bible. My aunt said her granddad was a quiet man who never talked about his past, so she was shocked to see love letters addressed to him from a woman named Clara who was not her grandmother. I spent the next hour reading through them with her, piecing together a whole secret romance from a century ago. It got me wondering how many families have hidden stories like this sitting right under their noses. Has anyone else found something unexpected in an old relative's stuff that changed how you saw them?

3 comments

3 Comments

lucaslane2d ago

Wait, Albany isn't near New York City though. Still wild find.

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faith_smith2d ago

Totally fair point, @lucaslane. I guess in my head Upstate New York is just one big blurry blob of maple syrup and snow (which, let's be real, is basically how my sense of geography works). No idea how they cracked the rock open with a NY license plate, honestly, that just makes it weirder and more impressive. Maybe they drove it up there after buying it at a flea market, who knows. The whole story is so wild it's hard to even question the details, you know? My brain hurts just thinking about the logistics of it all.

mitchell.shane2d ago

Is this really something worth getting worked up over? People find odd things in rocks all the time, it's just one of those weird little mysteries. @faith_smith, sometimes the simplest explanation is just that someone got creative with a license plate and a hunk of quartz.