Auction day!

Now that my family’s auction is over and I am largely recovered, I will share a few photos from the event.  I intended to take a lot of photos, but the day was too busy to be pointing a camera too much.  I took most of my photos before the action became fast and furious.

My siblings and I have been working towards this sale for the better part of a year.  Neither my grandparents nor my parents ever had sale when the previous generation passed, so that task fell to the three of us.  Worse, my parents, children of the Great Depression and World War II, never threw anything away.  And I do mean anything.  We found receipts from 1970 and check stubs from long-ended jobs of 40 years ago.  Naturally, good things were mixed in with the junk, so we had to go through everything very carefully and couldn’t just toss it first.

But finally, we were as done as we were going to be, and it was time for auction.  We sold old things and new, farm implements you’d have to be a bodybuilder to lift, household items—all manner of things. We had family and antique dealers, friends and strangers attend. The day was gorgeous, and we had a decent turnout, if not quite the standing room only crowd we might have hoped for. With 50 other sales in a 30-mile radius, buyers were spread a tad thin.

One of the things we sold was the old buckboard wagon, which I loved to sit in as a small child.  The man who bought it plans to restore it, though he expects that's a 4-5 year project.  He will enlist some Amishmen to replace the wood around the iron wheels.  He tells me that alone takes 3 months per wheel.  I'd like to see it again whenever it's done.

Still, the event was a nice success for the family, and the house and old barn are now a lot, if not entirely, empty.  There’s still more work to be done, though no deadline looms over our heads to accomplish that. Now, we can go through the mountains of photos we want to digitize and identify as many ancestors as we can.  We also have a lot of old documents that we need to examine and figure out what to do with, since starting a family library the way former presidents do is probably not going to happen.