Feb. 13--You've got a cluttered attic, a seldom-visited storage locker or maybe a desk jammed with unsorted papers and old photos. Somewhere in your life you are probably overdue for some spring cleaning.
If so, consider:
--In Ohio, Carol Armstrong was looking through a closet after her husband died when she found a white cloth bag containing all kinds of junk: brackets, straps, cables, an old movie camera. Uninteresting, except Armstrong's late husband, Neil, was the first man to walk on the moon. She'd discovered the so-called McDivitt Purse, in which Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, stowed equipment used during his trip to the moon's surface. Armstrong returned the bag to Earth, stashed it in his house and apparently never mentioned it to anyone. These are priceless artifacts now in the grateful hands of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
--In Maidstone, England, archivist Mark Bateson was "leafing through" a Victorian-era scrapbook in a government library when he paused to study an intriguing, tattered document. What's this? Oh, it's a previously unknown edition of the Magna Carta, the 13th-century decree establishing the concepts of individual rights and legal justice, making it one of the most important documents in history. King John issued the charter in 1215 -- exactly 800 years ago. This edition, which belongs to the town of Sandwich, is one of seven surviving copies of the revised 1300 charter, according to the BBC. It could be worth $15 million.
--Jeff Nichols, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was perusing obscure World War I-era film footage on a European website when something unexpected appeared: two scenes of a capsized ship. In the digital equivalent of misfiling a crucial document, someone had attached those sequences to an unrelated reel. Nichols recognized immediately he was watching clips of the Eastland disaster, the July 1915 incident in which an overloaded ship capsized in the Chicago River, killing 844 people. Nichols accidentally discovered the first known film footage of the tragedy.
So, what do you have in your closet?
Probably not antiquities or other valuable goods. You won't hit the jackpot like Tonja Carter, the Alabama lawyer doing paperwork for her client, author Harper Lee, when she stumbled upon Lee's unknown manuscript for a second novel. You also won't duplicate the find of Chicago history buff John Maloof, who bid on a trove of unclaimed photographic negatives from a storage unit. Through his effort, he helped introduce the world to now-acclaimed street photographer Vivian Maier.
Each of the above tales is ripped from recent headlines. Nothing so newsworthy will happen to you by cleaning out the garage or cleaning up a hard drive. Sorry.
But still you may find treasures:
Precious works of art from children now grown, old letters from a departed loved one. A sleeve of negatives capturing a summer moment. A significant email exchange. Your second-grade report card. All these mementos, priceless in their own way, are somewhere in your possessions. Go find them.
When you are finished excavating, preserving the important stuff for posterity, you get to toss out the rest and reclaim some order. That's a good find, too.
