Donating your finds

[triplehooked]

A half dozen or so farm towns in my area opened their museums for a free weekend to the public. This was a great opportunity for me and my boys to get out and visit multiple museums to help glean more info. about the good ole' days. In return, I was able to donate some of my finds to a few of these small town historical societies to be enjoyed by the public. I was, albeit reluctantly, able to donate a few early amusement ride tokens, a steamboat token, an old boy's belt buckle, a couple of older ax heads, and an old broach. All that I asked was that if possible they be labeled "Found by a local metal detectorist". I hope, if anything, this helps to improve the reputation of our beloved hobby, but as a bonus I was pleasantly, no, ecstatic to have been given in depth info. of the local area. Including an old steamboat stop, a couple of church's that burnt down and have been farmer's fields since the 1930's, and even a little known hand drawn map (early to mid 1800's) of one of the local towns. My goal of this thread isn't at all to brag, but to encourage fellow detectorists by being a steward of the the hobby and help to contribute not necessarily by donations, but positive representation of what we do. You never know what you will get in return!!

 

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[U.K. Brian]

Sounds like me years back. Then I went back to the museums in question a few years on and alas most of "my" items had gone. This was done on the basis of better examples coming in so mine were sold on. Now I only loan but the problem with this is that they don't want to spend money conserving an item if its not their's.

A big plus if the museum is local is that you can pick up detecting sites that you might not otherwise be allowed on.

 

[triplehooked]

Very true, Brian. Hopefully being that these are smaller, local museums I will not see that. But you never can tell. The gals were making quite a fuss over the tokens, some of which they had not seen before. I ended up gaining access to the archive area of one building that had the old handwritten maps in it. I think the reason the maps weren't on display was that it showed where one of the prominent business's of the area was built on Indian burial grounds, which was kind of disheartening, but interesting to learn.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

triple-hooked, your logic is correct: The more "in's" you have with historical societies, museums, etc... the more opportunity to find gems of info. for research sakes, later on. I am a docent (lead tours, man the counter, etc...) at two local museums, JUST so I have carte-blanche to various resources, historians, etc.... And yes, have donated things to museums, so that the "in" gets developed there too.

But as Brian says, your stuff can "disappear" into basements, storage, and boxes, etc... I know this sounds "disrespectful", but you have to put yourself in the position of the museum: They get donations from well-meaning people all the time. Eg.: the person comes in with great great grandmas old sewing machine that was used to stitch up soldier's uniforms in the CW. Or grandpas enlistment papers from WWII, blah blah blah blah. And EACH person donating thinks their item should be prominently placed there, and that they can dictates what the dossier will say, and so forth. If each person were "accomodated", the displays would be changing weekly, and at the whims of the general public. There simply isn't enough volunteer staff and time to keep up with all that. And to keep rotating stuff out (d/t space constraints) deprives future visitors from perhaps seeing something that really should be still there.

But on the other hand, the musems catch flack if they say "no thank you" to anyone's sincere donation, lest you "offend" them. I've seen it all. So museums (at least the ones I work at) develop strict standards of what items they'll accept. And they will not agree to donation terms like "must be displayed" or "on loan only", lest people come in later and demand things out of cabinets, or lest it put the museum's displays into anyone else's whims, etc... You have to give it to them without any qualifations normally.

So if you had something real valuable, and this bothered you (that it might never see the light of day again, and disappear into archives), then it's a factor to consider. But if something is super "site specific" (has the name of a founding father of that town, etc...), yet no commercial value (ie: ebay or whatever), then yes, those are great items that the museum could want, and can generate "in's" like you say.

 

[triplehooked]

Great info. Tom. I can definitely see where donations could become sensitive with some people. I had offered other items to the museums but I made it clear to them that if it wasn't something they wanted to tell me up front, which they did. They were very excited about the other stuff and put the items on display right away, which I found kind of funny. The cool thing was that each item was documented as to where, how, and even how deep it was. Maybe 100 years from now someone will pull these items from a storage box and see what one of those antiquated Spectras found.....lol.

 

[NYScrap]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as the museums are Non Profit (501-C...) then you should be able to write off the donations. It should be much like donating build supplies to Habitat for Humanity, where you can assign a reasonable value to the items, and claim that value as a tax deductible donation as long as you get a receipt. Another advantage.

 

[Billinoregon]

Triple: I think your original gesture is generous, commendable and in the hobby's best interests. Yes, museums have to make controversial decisions at times and are subject to all sorts of internal and external politics (ask me how I know!), but it never hurts to present the good side of the detecting community.

 

[MassBK]

back on brian's thought...imo, it is better to pass on valuable finds to those who will be close to me in the future

my dad got me into this hobby and he has faith that I will secure/cherish his finds and collections for years to come....

just my 2 cents....