Item 0001unclaimed
Recipe card, handwritten. Pound cake.
From a great-aunt’s recipe box, scanned by a relative after she died. One card of a boxful.
scanned 2024
Public lost property
Items waiting to be claimed by history.
Most history was ordinary while it was happening.
Item 0002unclaimed
Bus timetables, 1970s.
Routes of the former Middlesex and Boston Street Railway. The company is gone; the folding schedules survive.
photographed 2021
Item 0003unclaimed
Greyhound timetable, 25 June 1975.
Syracuse and Buffalo to Toronto. Departure times of buses that ran half a century ago.
scanned copy
.jpg)
Item 0004unclaimed
Restaurant menu, Childs.
Two-colour card stock, prices printed, some handwritten. Kept by a library; most menus were thrown out with the day.
in a public collection
Item 0005unclaimed
Answering machine with its two cassettes.
Whatever voices are on the tapes were never meant as history. Machines like this held the only copy.
photographed 2022
Item 0006unclaimed
GeoCities. Thirty-eight million personal pages.
The host shut down in 2009. Volunteers copied what they could in the final months; the rest is gone.
partial copy at the Internet Archive
Item 0007unclaimed
BBS text files, 1980–1995.
The writing of a network that predates the web, kept because one person started collecting it in 1998.
kept at textfiles.com
What should not disappear?
Claim accepted.
Keep one copy somewhere boring. We did not save it and cannot; you can.
photo · screenshot · printout · local file · folder
Photographs and scans
- 1970s timetables of ex-M&B bus routes. Byron A. Nash from USA. CC BY 2.0.
- Childs Menu. unknown. Public domain.
- Greyhound timetable 1975-06-25 02. Piergiuliano Chesi. Public domain.
- Panasonic Answering Machine KX-T1423 with two Compact Ca. Pittigrilli. CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Pound cake recipe card - Handwritten 2024-05-21 103943 p. SJGW. CC BY-SA 4.0.