What is the oldest or most historic thing in your house?

Probably the family bible that belonged to my paternal grandmother—it dates from the early 1900’s.

An old vacuum cleaner from the old GDR, when times were better.

My wife’s desktop pc is from 2005.

Me.

Either my mother’s baby clothes, or the furniture downstairs in the living room that my grandparent’s gave my parents as a wedding present (but I am not certain if they were purchased new, or if they were heirlooms.) We don’t have very many old pieces in our house, but I do love antiques and hope to populate my future apartment with furniture that has character.

You go. There is nothing like the warmth of old, nice furniture to make people feel at home!

Well our house itself is about a 100 years old. not sure I have anything much older than that around.I do have some photos of relatives that may be a bit older than that.

We have a wooden trunk that a relative brought over from Russia in the mid-1800s; it of course is even older than that. It’s been with my mom’s family for generations.

Some days I feel like I’m the oldest and most historic thing in my house, but actually, it’s my Russian great grandmother’s solid brass mortar and pestle.

Cool @Pachyderm_In_The_Room!

I didn’t get to come back and edit my earlier entry as I had planned. So you could say that I lied, which is more or less true, I guess, since I didn’t get to modify the joke. So, I lied.

The house itself is older than I am by a few years. I have a lot of my parents’ wedding gifts (most of the kitchen utensils, some of the silver and some other decorative items) that have survived my childhood (and which predate me), and I even have a few possessions left by grandparents, but those are vanishingly few: some wooden carvings and a gold pocket watch that hasn’t worked in my lifetime, for example. My sisters got most of the furniture; I was moving too much to want it when it was being distributed.

I also have – and I think each of my siblings also has – a framed copy of a panoramic photo from FDR’s 30th college reunion, celebrated at the White House in 1934 with the rest of his classmates from Harvard’s Class of 1904. Since my paternal grandfather was a classmate of FDR’s at Harvard and he was invited to the White House for the celebration (with family), he appears in the photo with his wife, my grandmother, and my father, uncle and aunt as children. (As you might imagine, this is a photo of many hundreds of people, who would have taken advantage of that invitation at that time.)

Unusual for this family, they appear in the front row of the photo. My uncle told me the reason for that several years ago: He and my dad had been running around (as 10–12 year-olds-will do when allowed to in the summertime) barefoot on the lawn of the White House, and my father was one of the last children in the entire group to get his shoes on for the photo (for whatever reason I can only imagine, since his shoes don’t appear in the panoramic shot), so the whole family waited on the sidewalk in front of the group while Dad put on his shoes, the group assembled and posed, and the photographer readied his equipment. Then, just before the shot was made (shots were made), the whole family fell into place in the very front row, and that’s how they were captured – not a group of tiny, indistinguishable heads in the background, but front and near-center. I love that photo.

Chest of drawers from Bavaria that has been in the family since it was made about 1740–50.

The oldest thing I have acquired that is in my house is the Model 1842 musket from the civil war.

WHAT an awesome story @CWOTUS!

The Christening Gown my Grandmother made for my Dad in 1921, and the family heirloom diamond ring that was give to my Mother-In-Law’s grandmother.

My great grandfathers Mason parade sword. It’s not worth a whole lot because they made lots of them but it is quite old. It was given to him about 1890 – 1900. That’s when the model was made anyway.

I have a couple heirloom jewelry pieces, but have no idea how old they are. I don’t think we have anything that’s considered historically valuable.

Childhood pictures of my grandmother when she was going to a boarding school in India. Her stories from back then are a really interesting view of British imperialism.

I have many Norwegian antiques that date back to the 1700’s and there is a whale oil lamp that may date back even further. They were collected by my son’s great great uncle and handed down to us. I have the original ‘American steamer chest’ his great great grandfather used to travel back from the US with after he contracted TB in the 1870’s. (looks something like this: http://www.metropol.se/auctions/bildshow/default.asp?OG=%7BD2EC0540-BAE6-438C-8573-B49BC0FB61BE%7D

A Bible, print date 1843. It’s leather bound and still in decent shape. It was part of my Civil War reenactment garb.

oops, that link doesn’t work. see this one instead.

http://gfx.dagbladet.no/labrador/958/958703/9587037/jpg/active/320x.jpg

The oldest things I have are a pair of Victorian brass candlesticks. Not sure of the exact date, but around 1880 or so. The house itself is the next oldest, at 74.

@cazzie Is that Howard Cosell in the picture on the right? :)~

Oh, I forgot. I can probably include my piece of mammoth tusk as the oldest thing I have.

The house itself which was built in 1890. I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything older than that.

I’m very lucky to have in my collection of weights & scales an American war of independence postage scale 1776 I value it because of it’s history, looks and it still works. must find a way to link a photo.
The oldest Item I have that I know the age of is two flies in Baltic amber 40,000,000 years

I am.

I have a dirt cellar. I SOOO wonder what I’d find if I ever dug the floor up. Also, the walls are made of blocks of rock. I wonder if anything is hidden behind any of them.

gasp You should totally do it. I want to be there when you do.

If there’s any Edgar Allan Poe story happening, I want to witness it.

My kids were scared to death of that cellar! They swear the original owners of the house kept slaves down there and they all died down there. I tried to tell them the house was built after the Civil War but they refused to change their story.

@Dutchess_III when we moved into our current house we needed to have some of the ground floor floorboards replaced. There is no cellar, just a space about 2 feet deep, with mud at the bottom. In there we found an old newspaper, dated May 1939 which is when the house was build. The headline read “There Will Be War by September”. It was fascinating reading, even the adverts. Sadly, the newspaper didn’t survive and after a couple of hours it just crumbled away.

Oh, how cool @downtide…..I found a 1969 LIFE magazine rolled up in one of the plastic curtains of the 1969 boat we bought for $1000. It was a big boat. I always felt like Jackie O when I was in it.
The magazine featured the Apollo 13 near disaster. It was fascinating reading the article. I was amazed at how closely they made the movie to resemble the actual event.