A short while ago, I was reorganizing my wallet and arranging my money bills according to denomination. Not many, I can assure you, but I began staring at them and wondered just whose hands these may have passed through. Did a general use one, etc, etc.? Can anyone wonder at some other items such as products on store shelves and the like?
That's an interesting question, @Lois Winters . Didn't somebody do a study a few years ago where they marked some dollar bills and traced where they were spent?
I think I remember reading about it. It seems that one that they traced went from NY or NJ in a days time. I don't remember how long ago it was. Maybe someone here can find it.
I was more interested in who might have had that bill in his/her hands. Then I began thinking of products and the like.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...tates-is-a-surprisingly-useful-hobby-8698826/ This is bad, since my hyper-linking skills are minimal. However, the Smithsonian magazine had a big article on tracing several $1 bills across America. It appears on their website with the above link. You can sign up for free to get all their stories or use a fake email to read around on the site. I keep a wierd gmail I never check for such purposes. As for your question @Lois Winters , I HAVE done that. Not just with money, but with a dish or an odd garage sale find. I wonder what the person was like who owned it before me. What did they like about the object? I think it speaks to how life just rolls on generation after generation.
They did a study years ago in Miami and determined that a large percentage of $100 bills (I can't remember the figure) tested positive for cocaine. You'd have little doubt whose hands those came through.
I was going to respond to your thread that I get that feeling when I'm in a flea market or antique store. I sit in a smoothed old wooden rocking chair and wonder about the people who sat in it years ago; how many babies got rocked to sleep. Or pick up an old china teacup and conjure up a tea party in days gone by. I also slide my mama's original wedding band onto my finger; it's so thin that it's almost worn in two on the underside. It takes me back in time to watching my mother's hands as she rolled out pie crust or scrubbed my dad's collars.
I always liked investing in things. When I had my antique guns, I often wondered who had owned them and how they might have been used. I once owned an old Ford pickup and was the second owner and when I bought it, the original owner's daughter included a scrapbook of her father and his pickup and their travels. I included it when I sold that pickup. I wondered about an old Singer treadle I had bought that needed repair and the second-hand dealer said it came from the old Bachelor's Apartments that were torn down. I investigated the history of the Bachelor's Apartments and found it was the polite name for a whore house. My Singer was used by ladies of poor repute during the great depression.
Thank you, Beth. This is precisely what I was after. In the Where's George thread, one does not necessarily have to "wonder" about the money. If there is a "hit" one knows where it has been and needn't wonder at all. What I intended is what you inferred. It is the intangible and not the tangible that I was hoping for. So be it.
@Faye Fox's comments about the treadle sewing machine reminded me that we have my husband's grandmother's old Singer. I love to open the wooden drawers occasionally because all her things are inside, exactly as she left them. Small scraps of quilting, her favorite scissors, at least a dozen thimbles, and countless bobbins with different colored threads...all waiting on her return since she died in 1989. I can put a thimble on my finger and imagine all the wonderful things she made at that machine, which still works perfectly. There are even a few letters and note papers stashed in one drawer. My husband says his grandmother could sew anything, and he was the happy recipient of many "home made" shirts as a kid, sewn with love by his sweet Grandma.
I do that about land and houses. I want to know about anyone who ever lived in the house, or owned the land, before me. And the houses and land of my grandparents. I've traced back as far as I can.
I do that about old abandoned houses, too. How many babies were born there? How many babies died there? Was there joy and laughter? Heartbreak and tears? Did the joy and laughter outweigh heartbreak and tears? Why did they leave? Could you still hear the distant echo of either of them if you went inside? There is an old house near me that has a small family cemetery plot in the front yard. It has three tiny graves in it. The dates of death are about a year apart. Three babies that were born and died about a year apart. The dates are from way back in the early 1900s, maybe late 1800s. . When you stand there, you can almost feel the pain that the parents must have suffered.