Featured Treasure Trove I need to investigate

My sister visited yesterday and brought me down 8 bins of "stuff" from my parents house. I have a lot to go through. One of the most interesting things was a large box of letters that my great aunt had saved. She was bed-ridden for 50 + years from the flu outbreak in the 30's. she spent her time writing letters to pretty much everybody in the news during those years. I went through the first bundle last night.....It includes signed letters from Carol Burnett, Edward G robinson, albert Einstein, Cardinal Spelling, Joan Crawford, Red Skelton, Harry Truman and others. It also includes about 150 from the royal families of England, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. She sent them all birthday cards, and the such for all important family events (Birthdays, Deaths, Birth's , marriages etc....). Of course all were signed by Ladies-in-Waiting, but interesting none the less. I have about 500 to go through. They are all in original envelopes, with associated newspaper clippings attached. A very interesting treasure trove to say the least. One of the more amusing, was a letter from the Queen (England) thanking her for the gift of Crème Perfume she sent for the silver Jubilee!

 

Sounds very interesting!

 

How fascinating, sounds like an interesting read!

 

Bet the stamps are neat too,

 

8 bins?? Someone is going to be busy.
Letters sound quite interesting.

 

That sounds like pile of work, but interesting work.

 

Sounds like some really great autographs. Some of these can be quite expensive to authenticate. I encourage you to take good quality photographs of these and post them to this forum

https://live.autographmagazine.com

I use this group religiously and their opinions are the best out there, period. The respective experts will be happy to weigh in. Additionally, they have a forum to buy, sell and trade if you so desire.

Good luck!
Dan

 

Thank you all for your replies. Special thanks to @Danno for the autograph group link. I will post some there once I get them a little more organized.

 

I spent a couple hours going through another set of letters. I'm posting a couple I thought were amusing. She seems to have sent some of her original poems to members of the Royal Family. Judging from the numerous letters from Marshall Fields, she developed quite a rapport with their CEO. I have not read them all, but they all seem very personal. There are 100 or more replies from the White house from presidents from Truman through Jimmy Carter. All Auto Signed cards. LBJ was a favorite of hers.....the lot is fascinating.

 

Bdigger, your great aunt was certainly a lady with true gumption (as they used to say!)

Do you know, I'll bet a publisher might be interested in publishing copies of those letters! Divided by "catagory" (Presidents/Royal family/Actors+Actresses/etc, etc, etc) - perhaps with some commentary and/or anecdotes in between - I think they'd make a book of interest to a lot of people.

Even right now, I'd say they're absolutely priceless as family memorabilia!

 

I'd put them in order by country, sender's name, and date and put the lot somewhere safe. That's a heckuvan archive.

 

SBSVC.... that could be. Adjectives I have seen in some of her replies include long and interesting. If I had to guess, judging by the Christmas letter she would send (often more then 25 pag) many of her letters to these people were several pages with TMI. Lol

 

25 PAGES? Oh, my...

 

Usually people summarize their year, what they've done, where they've gone. What did your great aunt fill hers with? A list of all the letters she sent that year? And what is there to do in Calumet?

Too bad you don't also have the verses she sent to Diana and others. Did she make rhymes especially for them? One of my great grandmothers seems to have written only in verse.

Just sorting them into categories of recipients & putting in chronological order should be great 'fun'.

 

Fascinating collection. Churchill signature looks like the real thing. If you have the envelopes be sure to keep them with the relevant letter for dating and provenance

 

She would talk about everybody who would visit her, and the topics discussed, what relations they had to family history and any interesting things she would observe through her window throughout the year. When you visited her, you would have to sign her guest book, list your hobbies and interests. From then on you were on her mailing list!
Calumet, is a small town of copper miners in the Northern Most tip of the Upper peninsula . Not much happens there. People still sleep with their doors unlocked though

 

I do have a copy of the poem she wrote for prince William and sent to him.
Among the letters is also several hundred rejections she got for her submissions to Reader Digest, Ideals, good housekeeping and other magazines. Also, a lot of letters from "Famous Writers School" which I haven't got yo yet

 

Here is a little insight into the woman......She was a hoarder of sorts.....when you entered her house, the living room was stacked with newspapers all neatly stacked, but you just had a small pathway to get through. No "junk" just newspapers. The rest of the house was pretty much "clear" of stuff. I suppose this explains why all of these letters she has ,have related Newspaper clippings stuffed in the envelopes.
One of the upstairs bedrooms was stacked full of neatly stacked boxes. I mean FULL. Inside the boxes were egg cartons, inside the egg cartons were blown out egg shells. The story is in the 30's one of her neighbors was doing craft projects with blown out egg shells, and asked her to save some for her. She never stopped.
In her desk , we found a little bag of candy with a note inside that read.....These candies were given to me in October 1932 by so and so,,,,on the occaision of my wedding to Melvin Talbot. One of the upstairs closets was stuffed full of Raggedy ann and andy dolls. Over 100 of them.

 

Wow -- How long ago did she pass away?

 

She passed in the mid 80's if I remember right