Last Saturday I had the eerie experience of going to what could almost have been my own future estate sale: it was mostly genealogy and classic movies. Sadly for the person who had passed, but happily for me, the genealogical materials were literally being given away. Most of the books were either obsolete or not within my areas of interest, but I did find one book I desired. When I asked the price, they said, "You can have it." In the free box I found a box of old CD-ROMs from Ancestry, Family Tree Maker, and more. Although I suspected they were probably obsolete, I grabbed the whole box to look through at home.
When I got home, as expected, the software CD-ROMs were too old for my operating system, but I discovered that most of the CDs in the box were actually photo CDs, containing many scans from someone's old photo album. And one was actually an audio CD, containing a digitization of a wire recording made in the 1950s!
Well, you know that I can't throw out someone's genealogical documents, especially when there are so many clues to help me connect them to the correct family. Although it did not occur to me until it was too late that I should have taken note of the address of the sale to help identify the former owner of the documents, many of the photos are named, and a few of the CDs even contain family trees. Perhaps (and hopefully!) I will discover that all of these are already shared in places such as the FamilySearch tree, WikiTree, and Geni. If that is the case, I won't need to worry so much. But until I can be sure that they are available to those who have an interest, I will slowly comb through.
