Personal items acquired as part of a purchase

[effe]

So I won an autographed ball a while back and the auction house also included a small photo album containing photos of people taken with the athlete and the event, presumably picturing the group attending the signing event. I'm saving a photo of the athlete signing my ball, but I still feel weird about just chucking the rest of the booklet. These were somebody's memories. I know there is no way to get these back to the family (or at least would be difficult) and presumably they didn't want them anyway as they included it with the consignment. I kind of wish they hadn't even included it.
Can anyone else relate to this or am I just odd?

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by effe

So I won an autographed ball a while back and the auction house also included a small photo album containing photos of people taken with the athlete and the event, presumably picturing the group attending the signing event. I'm saving a photo of the athlete signing my ball, but I still feel weird about just chucking the rest of the booklet. These were somebody's memories. I know there is no way to get these back to the family (or at least would be difficult) and presumably they didn't want them anyway as they included it with the consignment. I kind of wish they hadn't even included it.
Can anyone else relate to this or am I just odd?

Yup. I won some bulk lots from an auction house years ago from a boxing collector/dealer who had passed away, and in going through some of the boxes I found stuff like real estate contracts, divorce papers, love letters, personal cards/notes to family members/spouses, birth and death certificates and lots of other "not boxing" stuff.

I couldn't bear to just throw it away and I couldn't really show it to anybody else...so now it's all buried in a small box somewhere in some corner of my house for somebody else to find someday after I'm gone.

I did try and give it away to another collector/historian (not dealer) I trusted, who was a good friend of this collector/dealer and was interested in the history of the hobby and people involved in the hobby in general...and he didn't want to have anything to do with it at all.

[gunboat82]

Feeling a twinge of anxiety over throwing out someone's keepsakes is normal... it means you're a fully-formed human being. But you've already run through the options and reasonably noted that (1) the original owners treated the album as a consignment rather than as a collection of memories, and (2) it would be difficult, if not impossible, to track them down. Having already gone through that thought process, you should feel free to dispose of the album without guilt (and kudos for being compassionate enough to pose the question in the first place).

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by gunboat82

Feeling a twinge of anxiety over throwing out someone's keepsakes is normal... it means you're a fully-formed human being. But you've already run through the options and reasonably noted that (1) the original owners treated the album as a consignment rather than as a collection of memories, and (2) it would be difficult, if not impossible, to track them down. Having already gone through that thought process, you should feel free to dispose of the album without guilt (and kudos for being compassionate enough to pose the question in the first place).

Yes, this is right. There are many things I have that are very special to me - pictures of childhood friends, favorite (non-valuable) toys, and so on. I wouldn't sell all that stuff for a thousand dollars. It's a bummer but the fact is, when I die, all that precious stuff is dumpster bound.