This Might Have Belonged to Your Grandpa

Before you read any further: if you believe in preserving history, honoring our ancestors, and reuniting families with their heirlooms, please consider donating to my GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/c16576b0.

Your support will help me purchase more lost genealogical items—family bibles, photographs, letters, marriage certificates, military records, and more—before they’re destroyed, and then research and return them to living descendants, either at cost or entirely for free.

This work is deeply personal to me. I grew up without any family heirlooms of my own. My family—like so many others—either sold or lost their precious items through poverty, separation, and time. I don’t have photos of my grandparents. I don’t have handwritten

letters, pressed flowers, or documents to pass down to my children. And when I realized just how many people out there were also missing their family’s story, I made it my mission to help.

I started buying orphaned genealogical items—old letters, cabinet photos, family bibles—and tracing them back to their original families. I’ve returned a 100-year-old ledger to the great-grandchild of a family store owner (it still had pressed plants inside!). I’ve sent postcards back to the grandchildren of the people who once received them. These small returns spark huge feelings—connection, memory, healing.

But time is running out. With the rise in popularity of vintage art projects, more and more historically valuable documents are being sold off and destroyed. People are cutting up century-old letters and gluing them to scrapbooks. Photos with names on the back—someone’s great-grandfather—are being tossed out or torn up for crafts.

Auction sites are selling bundles of documents to the highest bidder, and those bidders don’t always value the stories. These heirlooms are disappearing, sometimes forever. So I’m doing what I can.

When I get my hands on an item, I begin with the names, the places, the context. I use resources like Ancestry and FamilySearch to trace the subject back to their descendants. I look through census records, birth certificates, obituaries, even social media. Once I find a living relative, I contact them—usually with a photo of the item—and return it either to them, or to whoever they think would want the item. Because I believe that these items already belong to the families, I don’t think people should have to pay to reclaim their own history. So many families lost these items, in the first place, due to poverty. Asking them to buy them back feels like adding insult to injury. My hope is to return as many items as I can for free—or at cost. But right now, I can’t afford to keep doing that on my own. That’s why I started this campaign.

I’m not asking for donations to profit. I’m asking because I can’t afford to make this dream real without help. Your donation doesn’t just buy a document—it rescues a memory. It buys time, research hours, postage, access to databases, archival storage, and the ability to say to a stranger: “I found something that belongs to you.”

And if you can’t donate? You can still help!

This is work anyone can do. The next time you’re in a thrift store, an antique mall, or at a garage sale—keep an eye out. Look for names, dates, places. Take the time to research. Reach out to families. Return what you can. We all have the power to be part of this—to stitch history back together one piece at a time. I believe that everyone deserves to know where they come from. I believe that history is made of small moments, and these items document the ones that made you.

And I believe in something even bigger: that if we start caring for each other’s pasts on purpose, we can heal something in our present. This movement has been the dream of my entire adult life. I want to teach people about their history, help them find their place in the human timeline, and eventually—open a space where people can learn, gather, shop, and reconnect with their ancestors in person. A storefront for healing, history, and humanity.

Your support could help make that dream a reality.

Please share this post. Please support if you can. Let’s bring these stories home.

One family at a time, one forgotten photo at a time, one grandparent at a time.

Donate here.