Nothing says trust quite like an IOU. And trust me when I say nothing pleases me more than being able to find one involving one of my distant ancestors. An IOU says, “you are an honorable man and I know that you’ll pay me when you can.” Perhaps more importantly, it tells me what was on my ancestor’s shopping list.

My latest example surfaced this week in The Indian Pioneer History Collection Papers at the University of Oklahoma and at the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Research Center.

How many times have you stumbled across an old box of pictures, letters, or documents only to find them too brittle to handle? If you haven’t yet, believe me, you will and then what do you do?

The basic problem with old documents, especially those stored in low-humidity environments like an attic, is that the paper itself dries out and becomes brittle. Just opening a letter or document can destroy it. Photos, in particular, should never be unfolded or uncurled without some TLC. And by TLC, I mean the use of a humidification chamber.

Taking a break from our regularly scheduled program (Letters from Leonard, Iowa) to bring you snippets of some other blogs I read on a regular basis. Content referenced by permission or with the author’s tacit approval (meaning they should be grateful for the huge volume of readers about to come their way ).

First, from Genea-Musings and our friend Randy Seaver, a subject near and dear to my heart — >The Online Family Trees Conundrum…

Fair warning, this is the third of four parts of a letter mailed from Leonard, Iowa, in March of 1901. In this section, Daniel Leonard describes what he saw and learned while visiting three of his eight siblings in Delaware, Marion, and Lorain Counties, Ohio.

“…We spent three or four days in Marion and Delaware counties looking for Shropshire sheep but to my disappointment I found none, but I saw one of the finest herds of Red Polls perhaps in Ohio, at least the finest I ever saw. Professor Curtis had passed them on and he knows….”

Early on in my family history research, I had the impression that my great-great-grandfather was either estranged from his birth family or completely cut off from the civilized world. That impression was based on the lack of evidence that they had communicated or visited one another.

Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong, as demonstrated by the following letter mailed from Leonard, Iowa (the post office named in Uncle Dan’s honor) to the editor of the Adams County (Iowa) Free Press…