Stories Behind Your Stuff (Matt Paxton and Mike Kelleher Live)

okay you guys we are live and so excited that you're here and to all of our participants um this has been a different time so we probably have a little bit of a different crowd but we are absolutely thrilled to welcome you both with us today and so right as we're getting started will you introduce yourselves and um kind of what we're talking about tonight and and like like we just want the story of how you two met so matt let's start with you and tell us who you are and then mike will go to you all right i'm matt paxton many of you probably know me from the tv show hoarders uh but i also have a new show on public television called legacy list with matt paxton and i help people tell their stories um and i love that you talked about telling stories because that's really what we're going to talk about tonight from you both of your your unique perspective as you get into people's homes and lives so i can't wait okay mike uh hi i'm mike kelleher and um i am on the show legacy list with matt paxton and i am what i guess i describe myself as a stuff expert expert okay how did you two meet yeah i'll start it we uh i was going to a christmas party and it was like an ugly or a tacky sweater christmas party and my neighbor goes there's this guy he finds these things and he sells them come to our house and i was like it's like this guy drives around and like sells sweaters out of his van she's like yes and i was like i gotta meet this guy you know so i go over and i meet him and i ended up buying a sweater and a couple weeks later i met him at another at another new year's eve party about a month later and i was like tell me what you do man and we start talking he's mike's the guy that uh that all the kids play with at a party like they all jump on his knee and they all hang out and he knows all the video games and he runs around with them and i was like this is a cool guy and i was like no what do you do we started talking and i was like so you like go to all these places and pick out records and just weird objects and i was like dude you met the one guy in the world you need to meet at this party and his wife told me i had to hire him a couple days later and we we weren't mike and i weren't smart enough to put two and two together and then his wife was and she just flat out told me like you gotta hire him and so like a month later we interviewed him and we offered him a job right on the spot and uh here we are what five years later national tv show okay so just i mean so excited to have you both here tell us a little bit about the show that you're currently doing together for those of our viewers who've never heard about it okay so legacy list it's called likes of us matt paxton and it's about uh mike and i used to clean out houses we've been doing that gosh i've been doing it for almost 20 years mike's done it off and on for 10. and um there's always when you go into a house and it's usually somebody downsizing it's not necessarily hoarding it's just people lived in a house 50 years it's a family house and generations have come through it and they've got lots of stuff and that's what mike and i did for a business for many years nothing about tv we just that's how we me that's how we fed our families we'd go into a house and we'd help people get rid of stuff and i would do like the talking and then hanging out and mike would help me like work figure out what all the stuff was i'd be like there's a box of records up there man and he'd be like oh yeah there's this one that's really awesome and then he'd be like but what you didn't see was the corning ware the corning ware is worth 200 bucks and it's the stuff that nobody wanted and so mike really gave me like some some stuff since we go in there we'd be able to say well well guys you know this isn't all trash you don't need to donate all of it um but when the the kind of the theory of a legacy list is the family always gives us four or five items they want us to find they're not lost they're just somewhere in the home it's usually like a wedding ring used to always be a wedding ring like yeah i lost it somewhere in my bedroom 20 years ago really like they really think you're going to be able to find it yeah we normally ring we always find honestly jewelry we always find it'll be like a picture or like a statue or just you know something it's usually something small it's not usually something big and then now as the show's evolved they also they're often like well i want to just know more about my family and so genealogy kicks into it so they'll be like you know my grandpa always said that they came over on the mayflower and here's a table that he like carved on the mayflower and of course we turn it over and it says haverty's you know but like they've got a family story that's very real to them yes and so we have to very delicately go and find the real story and you know the show is about stories it's not about stuff but the stuff is the vehicle and you know when mike and i would do this as a as a career we just loved hearing people's stories i mean i just love it like when someone will sit down and they'll say oh this is my grandpa's and i say well how'd your grandpa get it oh well he was like mike do you remember we had one it was a piece of wood a piece of uh looked like driftwood to me but in it what was it mike it was a a prowl or a oh yeah probably yeah it was um from a boat in the pacific islands and uh the the um gentleman was was in the war and he brought it back from the war yeah and she said i said now how did you get this it was the front a wood carving of a of a south pacific yeah and it was a south pacific canoe and she goes oh my grandpa was in the war and he always loved this and he brought it home to us so then we took it further our research team this is on the show legacy list we were able to go back and actually find what unit her grandpa was in and it turns out he was an engineer and i read that as like oh he's a mathematician that's cool no what the expert told us he would go before the u.s troops would like land on an island he would sneak into the island and figure out where they should land so he would figure out the mechanics of like oh the boats can land here and this is the time of the of the um you know of the waves and the water levels yeah tides and when the people are there they would basically were spies they'd go and scout these places and when this dude's figuring out where thousands of troops our grandpas and grandpas can land he had time to somehow say oh that's a beautiful piece of art yeah and he brought it home and that just blew us away and then now fast forward his daughter i said granddaughter his daughter is uh 60 years later she's an art expert and had taught at mit and taught art history mit and i'm like no wonder you were so into art your dad found it in the middle of the war and you know it's such it's really fun we find these items and we're able to be like well yeah i get your personality like i see why you act the way you do and i see why your granddaughter is the way she is because the the women and men in your earlier generations they instill these beliefs in in art for that family so we i mean god mike and i can tell a thousand stories you know but we we just love hearing those stories and what you've noticed is you don't hear us talk about the financial value um okay you're but you're about the artifact and the story and how it came to be and what it represents and the meaning behind it i don't even to care if the story is like 100 historically accurate i want to know about the person that told the story who passed it on to you and what did it mean to you you know the financial value really doesn't matter and you know when you die you can't take the money with you so i we don't care we really care about that story and mike and i just i mean i had hundreds of employees at one point and mike was the one that i always loved to be in the house with and just be like well dude what what'd you find he's like oh this lady she had a cat and he'd tell me about the cat you know and he'd be like this cat's amazing and we would just hear these really cool stories so so legacy list has come a long way in two years we're actually filming season two right now we're in the middle of it and we kind of stumbled upon a very historical time in the world you know we're filming in the middle of a pandemic during uh black lives matter during you know a woman is now running for vice president i mean it's pretty amazing we're actually in you know 20 years from now all the stuff we find in history we'll be talking about this last year i feel like and so it's been really interesting for us to see all these new things wow so so mike i just want to ask you um and i love that matt i love that you shared that that thing that looked like kind of nothing not only was it something but formative in that family story um mike what drew you to kind of understanding stuff and like you know did you grow up and say i want to go to college to like estate what drew you into that uh well i just always i'll tell you what generationally i grew up in a time where collecting things was just ingrained um in the 80s and 90s there was all kinds of comic books and trading cards and toy like all kinds of things that were limited edition and otherwise collectible and so um i think probably from from something along the lines of comic books or cards i kind of got the collector's bug so to speak but to be honest like there were shows on tv that i would watch and just you know really geek out on and then i started geeking out at the different stores and and yard sales and museums and just kind of like really just soaking in as much information as i could and then you know it's it's one of those things the knowledge is good but unless you put it to use what good is it my wife god bless her she got matt and i together but the one thing that she'll admit hi babe if you're watching but uh that you know she she changed her tune in terms of of her outlook on on my knowledge of collecting uh when i started working with matt because it validated that uh this knowledge is important because there's so many people out there that have stuff whether it's their stuff or their kids stuff or their parents stuff or whoever's and they don't know what to do with it and honestly sometimes the right option is to keep it sometimes it's best to sell it sometimes it's best to donate it and sometimes it's best to throw it away or recycle it so um you know it gives me a lot of joy basically to help people find the best outlet for their stuff oh i love that the best outlet for their stuff so we would love to hear from those who are watching and joining us here with matt and mike from the legacy list and we're talking today about the stuff that we find and the stories that we find in our stuff and i have a question for you both and it's kind of based off something mike said you talked about collectibles and as you've gone through professionally and as part of the show and helped people sort of unearth or um go through their things what are some of the most interesting types of collections you've seen you want to go yeah you go start you go first okay i mean shoot i've seen i've seen some pretty amazing things i found a picasso in a house um i found um amazing record collections just insane let's stop on that picasso real quick people don't realize picasso made a bunch of art at the end he was he'd sell it for like a hundred bucks he didn't care and anything he could put with his name on it he did it yeah but um but he's still a picasso i was standing there in the house mike brought her because this is a real picasso i'm like what no it is like that big by the way he's like that's picasso dude and i'm like wow whatever thought i'd be holding a picasso in my hands you know never yeah it was in a pile of of things that you would not expect a picasso to deserve to be in but then you hear the family story and it's like oh yeah that makes sense like when they put it together it's really really cool all right i cut you off keep going mike what are some of the other cool collections records records um i uh i helped a a former nascar team owner and his collection of nascar memorabilia i'm not even into nascar but i could appreciate the things that he had um and i mean just so many things but you know honestly some of the most amazing things are not the most valuable things so um you know while it's important to me that to make sure people don't throw away treasure you know if they don't want it let's get it to the right place and maybe get you some money for it but um well like that flag we found man we found a 44 star flag yeah and we it was like midnight we've been cleaning all day it was late in the night we found this and we couldn't count mike and i kept we were too tired we were too tired we've been cleaning for like three days straight because sometimes you're on a like an actual deadline and you might go for like three you know 36 hours straight to get it done and you just never know and it was late it was past midnight and we found this flag and mike and i are trying to count it and we couldn't count to 44 because we just kept thinking it was 50. and we're like wait what and then finally some girl walks and she goes it's 44 guys and and then we start thinking like where do you get a 44 star flag like there was no flags store back then you know and then we turned out it was actually for when um utah became a state that's what it's actually made for ow yeah and so then it was like well wait a minute how did your dad get or your grandpa get this flag and so we had to do some research there but yeah that wasn't i mean we never even found out the financial value because it wasn't like the family ever really cared they just loved the story and they wanted to know more but like that was not a million dollar collection i mean i found gosh we found some incredible cars incredible car collections um i'll tell you coolest thing i ever found i loved was that in that same house mike we found a um a key the guy worked her grandfather worked on what was it the uh the uh amino it was a pennsylvania to ohio or it was a pennsylvania ohio railroad and i found the locker to his key or the key to his locker on his train it was what he would keep his like wallet in and stuff so if he got robbed his you know things that mattered he wouldn't get they wouldn't get that and it was just a key like that big and i just thought it was 150 years old and i was just like gosh there was only one of these keys you know and like we just found it and the lady had no idea she's like and then her her daughter was like that's my great great my great grandfather's work key like that's so cool and so she put it on a necklace nothing nothing amazing um but it's a connection yeah yeah so we we i mean we're suckers for stories really anything i mean i found um gosh we found we had a beer bottle collection that was insane um and we found lebron cheese boots yeah i found liberace's boots yes this guy had actually collected all this liberace stuff and uh and i've ended up buying a pair of boots from them at the auction i mean we rarely we rarely buy stuff that's a question i have for you mike was there ever anything you wish you had bought from a house that we cleaned um i'll tell you what there's things that i would love to have but i i you know our our deal is if we want it we violate we bid on it just like everybody else so that way there's no uh no muddying of the water so to speak it's all above board and and the most money the family can get for the item but um there there was a uh there was a sign that somebody had taken off of the berlin wall and this was well before it was torn down and you could have been shot for that and so i saw that and i was like that'd be really cool to have but at the same time you know i i knew there's somebody out there that would love it more than me so you you go in you help people like clean out you discover sort of treasures um what do you think is really um like is there a theme or something that you find in every home when you're helping them clean out that connects people to their stuff is that like something that's been passed down or is it like what is there a common sort of theme that really i got an answer to that okay again this and this surprised me on the show we didn't really it doesn't surprise me now but i mean we have been cleaning houses for gosh almost 20 years with my hoarding work too but i um there's always a really strong female in the family that was in charge of the history and it's never the man it's never grandpa and so the stories might be about grandpa but the documentation of the history was a strong powerful woman and so now we go in like who is the who is the awesome chick in your family like oh that's my great great grandma and then they start we know where to start so we saved like a day because we start talking about who was this amazing woman and now um just naturally it's just always women i mean every house we do i mean we were wanna um this one i don't want to tell too much it's a season two spoiler but um we were at a a very famous civil war general's family's house and there were i mean everything in that house was right in the middle of the civil war i mean gosh we found something the other day mike in a house that was like literally at the ending of the civil war this item had been worn by someone at the last day of the civil war it was fascinating to me goodness um yeah but like we found all these things what was i going to talk about on the civil war part of it oh this big amazing plantation and we were starting you know the family just the current family didn't know if they want to keep up with it or not it was starting to wear them down and they're like well you're not we're not really proud of the family heritage as much as we used to be it's 2020. and we found a diary up in the attic from the woman right after the civil war and it was the exact same word she's like i don't know if i want to keep this place like it's really it's kind of wrong it's not really ethical anymore and it's just a lot of work and it was the same thing this lady's great great great granddaughter was now saying to us wow it's crazy so we just we love them we love all the stories we love the collections um i'll tell you what a collection i find all the time that i don't love yes yes tell us what you don't love beanie babies not a beanie baby i just got into that oh they did there's only two that are worth anything and the rest of them aren't okay which which two the princess diana purple one and then what's the crabs name the uh it's louis the crab it's from 1997 and there's like three misspelled words on the label that's why if it doesn't have the label it doesn't matter so it's a tie-dyed crab and i thought i found one this week actually like at that house of york i found one and then as i spent like 20 minutes on it i realized it was a miniature happy meal toy worth 99 cents okay um mike i love that question and matt's answer is there a collection or something that you don't like to discover or when you see you're like um for the most part no um i i just really enjoy and greatly appreciate the people letting us into their homes and share their stories so it's it's really interesting to me sometimes we don't meet the family and we're we're dealing with a distant relative who's in charge of of emptying the house so i'll learn a lot about the person who lived in the house through their stuff ah that's really fascinating to me but then when we have the bonus of being able to talk to that people or i mean talk to that person or people that know them it really fills in a lot of gaps so no matter what the items are you know i just appreciate that it means something to them and yes that is for me very respectful i appreciate you saying that we have a couple of questions um that we'll get to and i just um before we get to our questions actually one of our questions is where can people watch legacy lists and when will season two be available do you want to answer that matt yeah so season two will come out in january probably third week of january 2021 we are as you can imagine it's hard to film in the middle of a pandemic so we are we're actually on a two break two week break right now we go back out end of next week um you can find it on pbs.org on demand or on their app right now and then uh with any public television you just gotta look on your local directory because every public television is different i always use utah as a utah as an example you've got um two different public television stations in the same city and they're gonna air at different times you know so just go to your local provider but if you're a little more tech savvy you can go online we'll have a new we're putting together a kind of a guide to it now on mylegacylist.com but best thing is just go on your local pbs station and find out when it airs it's on everyone's running reruns from season one right now so it's on sometime and if not you just watch it on demand and pbs.org has one episode for free right now you can watch okay awesome um okay we have someone asking sarah she has grandparents that have lived in the same house for 50 years and they have military background and so i have all of this military stuff so if you were to you know give sarah some advice as the granddaughter who doesn't want to have to do all the heavy lifting what sort of advice would you give someone in that circumstance mike go for it well number one if there's guns in the house make sure that they know how to properly you know handle them or bring somebody else in to to look at them and inspect them beyond that i would say um you know if we're talking like world war ii items which you know they can they can a lot of soldiers brought back items that are very um very controversial so even though they were brought back it's sort of like spoils of war and they meant something as sort of a sign of victory still they they're symbols of of uh hate and other things that aren't well received so i would say look at the items and get a feel for what's in the collection and then from there maybe just start grouping things together if it's uniforms or paperwork or photographs just group those things together and then see if anybody in the family wants them and believe it or not there's there are outlets for for items that are um related to nazism and things like the holocaust museums and other uh organizations that are are really um showing the the true history yeah let me i'll say really you just gotta just like anybody working on genealogy you gotta do your homework and you gotta find out what you got you gotta put the you wanna put together basically just a an inventory list of what you have and then start digging and you know i'm i'm new to genealogy this year i think i told you andy i went to rootstech like on a whim i knew nothing i knew nothing about genealogy and i walked into rootstech world existed i mean mike i i came home and told you about it for like two weeks i mean it's it's like walking in the super bowl and you know every booth i went i went i walked through every single booth in the trade hall well you called me one night from roots tech like i think your first night or second night there and uh you were just you're just beside yourself with everything you were learning i mean it was like in college actually better than college i was learning a lot more i was more old and it was just it blew me away like there's so many specific people about very specific little things and so you know what we're what mike and i have learned and we do this in the show we do this in our real lives and we tell other people to do it like just pick one item and start to dig down on it and find out what we can um you'd be amazed how much you learn and then i mean we reach out to some of the top experts and people reach out to me all the time well what do i do and i'm like oh well let me connect you with you're in mississippi great i'll connect you with a very specific war person in mississippi there's a lot of small war memorials and war museums that there's like one dude running it and he would love to talk to you like he would think the greatest thing in the world and and you know there's a lot of people um you know depending upon the war there's only a few left in some of these guys and so you know they you want to talk to them there i mean we found this was on a hoarded house i was cleaning but we a couple years ago but it was right over by um where did the civil war end mike um what's the the battlefield yeah um we should it's an hour from our house we should know but anyway this house was right on the end of the battlefield and it's a 13 mile battlefield and we um we found a bazooka like a rocket launcher and it was in german and so one of my guys started translating it for me he's like i think this says it can shoot 10 miles he's like but my german might not be great and so we were like did we shoot it you know the answer was no we didn't but like we ended up turned out it was it was something the guy brought back from the korean war and it was just a fascinating thing i mean it was fascinating to find it and it was actually live ammunition so we ended up having to call in a gun hanging for that we actually called the bomb squad they came and got everything um so to mike's point safety first but then get curious and just take your time i mean there's no one place for uh all your answers that doesn't exist okay we're getting some good questions you guys this one is this is from helen and she wants to know how would you preserve something like a tracker pipe organ or pieces of it so just cut two ways to go here i tend to go with an upcycle which is instead of recycling it it's like how can we repurpose it for the family and some of these people love some don't my favorite upcycle i ever saw was a um we always find a jar of grandma's buttons and there's always a ball jar of a ton of really cool buttons and we had one family that they all went and got the most weirdest wildest button they could find and they put it on top on the top button of their jacket so each one of them had a wild crazy button from their grandma and so it it started as a crazy conversation starter and i love that and so i tell those things like what what's a and so then everyone in the family people would say what's up the button oh let me tell you about my grandma great conversation starter so i try to find on the organ like if it's non-functioning um tracker is a decent brand it's not going to be it's you know it's not the most amazing and if you're not going to actually play it i say take the pieces out frame it put it on a wall a lot like your really nice uh blankets or quilts you have behind you yeah do a display display it and then i like everybody to have a piece and and i get always get quoted on that bible verse and say you know you don't cut off your hair you you know you give it to the person and it's like man sometimes it's okay if everybody wants a piece like let them let them have it because you're not going to play the organ who cares i can tell you now organs are not highly in demand especially pump organs and specifically wagon pump organs so there's not a big market for them financially and i think one thing mike always says if you're deciding what it will sell for you've already made the decision to leave it from your home to remove it from home so why all of a sudden if it's only worth a certain amount would you not remove it i mean sometimes you have to remember you've already made the decision to let it go yeah who cares like don't bring it back just because it's not there's not a dollar amount on it like just give it to someone that will care okay okay this is great all right we have sally has a persian wedding bowl maybe mike this one's for you for you from the 1600s that the great grandfather bought off the docks in liverpool and she doesn't know how to research its history or value what would you recommend these are stumper questions that's that's good that's good um okay so persian wedding bowl from the 1600s yeah um well the first thing i would do is like as crazy as this sounds i would google wedding bowls persian wedding bowls and just see what comes up you're going to get a ton of stuff that you don't want to look through and doesn't even apply but you might find something that's going to just like with genealogy you find that one little piece of information about a family member and then it leads to all the others so first step is always just do a google search beyond that what i would do is depending on where where uh was it sally sally yes depending on where sally lives she might have a museum in her area that she could take the bowl to and see if they have somebody who might be able to give her more information on that use the resources that are in your area because uh there there are a ton of them that just go untapped um and then beyond that i would say um you know a piggyback off of the google is believe it or not check ebay that's a great tip you can get a lot of good information you have to vet it but you can get a lot of good information off of ebay because if somebody's going to sell it they have to list it accurately and so um maybe you find the same bowl or a similar bowl and you can compare or maybe there's some information in the description that helps you uh narrow it down but i'd love to see the bowl like i'm curious yes yes sally send me a photo we'll get it we'll get it to mike don't be afraid to call an appraiser as well i mean if if you're finding out if your pre-research tells you like if you don't find it at all that either means you you researched it wrong or it might be really interesting because it's not been listed and so both are really cool um now an appraiser is going to cost you money and i would estimate around 200 bucks an hour for that so you got to make sure you want to invest in that and i always say that research mike's talks about if you see a hundred of the same item and they all are listed for 100 bucks each well you just you know you're not going to call an appraiser but it might let you know okay it's worth calling one it doesn't mean you're going to sell it you just want to know is it worth even you know learning more about it and i'll say one thing real quick about the appraisers great option uh the two actually i'll say two things number one um when you're talking to an appraiser ask if they will just take a look at it to see if it's even worth appraising okay a lot of them will and then um the second thing is i see it all the time and it drives me nuts don't let your appraiser try and make you an offer on the items because that is 100 percent against the code yeah exactly so it's it's despicable if the guy makes if the if the appraiser makes you an offer grab the item and walk out of there because the appraisal the appraisal is no good if that's what they did yeah okay super good um advice i really appreciate this and dorothy is asking if you have any ideas or if you've seen anything when it comes to preserving old smoking pipes well the smoking pipes some of them are made out of bakelite or corn cobs and other natural things and then the bakelite which is a form of plastic so it really depends what they're made out of in terms of height but honestly i think if you keep them in a fairly humid uh climate-controlled space they should be pretty good um you know tobacco you want to keep lower humidity but the the pipes themselves i feel like if you if you treat them like you would anything in your house normally and keep it climate controlled and in a moderate level of humidity it should be all right yeah it's more about the climate in the house or where it's being preserved it's it's less about actually sealing the pipe itself i mean it's like a violin a violin needs to be played uh believe it or not a pipe needs to be smoked that's crazy to say that but it it needs to be actually if you don't if it just sits in a box it's not going to do any good yeah yeah the wood needs to breathe okay okay this is great um this is something from mark i'm sorry to catch up if you're if you pick up an old pipe and if you smell the tobacco you're in the right climate that means that wood is still good okay now your nose will tell you if it's any good or not all right keep going sorry what about um dorothy also is asking she has some metal pipes would you say the same thing for metal yeah i think if it's at room temperature like not in an un climate controlled storage unit or a shed or something like that i think it'll be fine um but the metal is going to mean it's from a different region and so i'm curious about the story on the pipe because the what it's made of was is metal and silver makes it more southern uh south america which is very interesting so i'd want to know more about really got it that kind of stuff yeah dorothy you've got a job um okay so this is this is a comment from marge and i i want to share it because i think it's a something good to discuss and she's nearing the end of her life and she wants to know what to do with her stuff she doesn't think it's worth money but there's lots of stories and so what would you recommend someone do to put the stories with their stuff how would you advise marge as she is you know thinking about leaving and maybe wants to pair the stories with the stuff well marge i would first say try to get on my show i'd love to come meet you that's what we do on legacy list the next thing is you need to get family members involved and if you don't have any family get friends or neighbors i mean uh if you're over a certain age you've you've helped somewhere along the way you've helped someone somewhere most of my clients over 80 they don't want to be a bother and they don't want to call a neighbor they say well they won't care trust me they do they actually want to so if you marge you just ask that question you're thinking oh i don't have anybody to call call them they actually want you to call because they love this opportunity and um the youngest generation the millennials right now they really will help they'll support you a lot so don't be afraid to call a friend call local family and just bite it in bite-sized pieces you can't look at the whole house it took you let's say 60 70 80 years to collect it all you're not going to do it in a long weekend so i love to say like one story one item do that every night and if you have a cell phone believe it or not you can record the story into your phone if not you could write it down writing it down is probably not the best way to do it anymore i really encourage you to have a grandson granddaughter come over and just tell them the story let them video you telling the story but you just have to ask for help and limit it to 10 20 minutes every couple days yes you know with the with the pandemic people have a lot more time on their hands right now to help so it's in your favor if you have somebody who's around yes the stuff that you think is interesting may not be what your family thinks is interesting so let them walk around the house and just say hey give me two items to you know pick two items you want me to tell you about and the kids will go well grandma what's this and you hold it up and she's like oh that's nothing i got that when i was at the olympics in 48. they'll be like what you know and so to you and me that's nothing and but your kids don't know all the stories and so it gets really really interesting yes okay i've got a couple more questions for you guys um and i want to remind people that are participating um there is matt you have a facebook page where um people can pay they can pay attention and they can follow you and um find out information on the show and then we shared we'll continue to share the link to the legacylist.com so you know those of you who are asking questions and interested this is fantastic and you can always connect with these two that way um there's two questions one is gigi is asking how how can she get cigarette smoke out of a wood plaque she has a wood plaque that has military pins attached to it so mike you made a face i hope that means you have an answer well you know depending there's there's some different variables there like is the wood finished is it not finished like is the wood just a piece of wood and it's just the pins that are important you may not be able to get the the tobacco smell out um there is a there's a machine that some companies have uh like uh disaster restoration companies will rent them out a lot of times um was it a deionizer yeah diana it's called ozone deionizer if your hou if the whole house is smells like smoke then you just you're going to put everything in that house and they're going to put it in overnight and it'll take all the smell out make sure you want the smell to go out i know this sounds crazy but like sometimes the smell is the memory and it makes you think of the person and then we've had families that say i want all the smoke out and then they do it they're like i kind of miss my grandpa doesn't like my grandpa anymore but call any local restoration company that would be like um service master or um what's the big green one mike um they're pro or you know they'll all have them um or belfor i mean there's a lot of good ones and that you can you can even rent the machine believe it or not at a like uh yeah but i mean i i would just i would leave it unless it's really really bad or mike says if you can transfer it to a different plaque an old trophy store there's still trophy stores in towns yeah um you guys are just such a wealth of information this is delightful we have a couple more questions if you're still good um i gotta i'm gonna keep answering that one i hate to this is the wrong group because i'm gonna say a crafting store but the crafting stores or the framing stores would be able to the framing stores would probably be able to restore that better than anybody could okay don't put it on a belt they'll put it on a felt board or put it in another frame that seals it yeah if the piece of wood is that important to you yeah that's a great idea kind of like a shadow box on that yeah okay um tammy is asking is there any good way to id a signature on a painting she's gone to museums but can't identify it so i don't know if that means she's taken the painting to museums um but yeah what tips do you have on that well paintings can be tough because it could be a very unknown artist who maybe was not very prolific maybe just a local artist and you just love the painting it could have been a student it could have been any number of different things other than a picasso or some some sort of like uber famous artist um oddly enough i found a group on facebook okay and they're called uh and i might get the name of the group wrong but it's something to the effect of um help me id this painting wow find the artist and so you post a picture of the painting and people will help you try and decipher the name and maybe uh find some information so i've seen some pretty amazing things with that and then the other thing is um you know if you've been to a museum you know as we talked about before maybe an appraiser or somebody else just a different or an art school might be a good option that's what i i've written i've written appraisal academies and i've written art schools and i've said hey look here's a i'm having a challenge with this art piece of art can you have the students all try to do the research on it and they'll take the pic now i can call because people they'll take my phone call but you'd be amazed how many groups may just help you and i love what mike said there's a facebook group for everything and people don't realize it now i mean uh and even an appraiser if you're gonna call a local appraiser or a local auction company they might have an expert i mean like i have for african american art there's a local auctioneer in washington dc that i use and they have a russian woman that is an expert on african-american art but she's the best regionally and so i'll call him and say look i'm not selling this but i need to buy like an hour of her time and he's in as long as you are up front like we're not selling then they're interested in doing it for the right but what you don't want to do to an auctioneer is be like oh yeah i'm going to sell it and then you find out the price and you're like never mind yeah just be open to say i'm just kind of research but there's an expert for everything don't be afraid to follow him i love that okay we have a couple people actually asking about quilts i think because i've got some displayed behind me and um these are quilts my mom has made so um but they want to know someone has quotes from like the late 1800s and some from their grandparents so what is the recommendation is it best to put it away is it a display item what do you recommen recommend for people who want to preserve old quilts uh well i would say you know there's the trusty cedar box like the hoax test or um the lane chests that were really popular i would also say take into account who's in your environment if it's just adults use the quilts enjoy them but if it's kids and dogs and cats and i mean the cats won't mess them up for sure but those dogs will and uh so think about preserving them and keeping them away from the the kids and the critters but other than that having a having a quilt that never sees the light of day is is pretty sad yes and don't be afraid of the shadow box preservation side of it as well we've seen some pretty amazing quilts in our day really restored properly and hung um i did a blog about this a couple weeks ago and i got just destroyed about it because i had a family that there was four sisters they all wanted it and i said fine just cut it into four pieces and i thought it was a great idea and every quilter in america destroyed my twitter and my instagram they're like how dare you how dare you tell you like you wanted to destroy the quilts well yeah they're like hey you know how dare you they're like that the other three daughters should have given it up so they wouldn't be torn apart and these are clearly women that have like labored over really good intricate you know they've made those quilts and if you've never made a quilt you don't understand how hard it is and how proud of it but uh end of the day man it's the story who's who made it why do they want it pianos is another one i've seen families break up over a piano two generations ago and now they fight over who has to take it not who gets it you know wow it just depends just a bit i think i think um i love how you talked about you know looking for the stories in the stuff and it's about the stories not the stuff and um as we're wrapping up i would love for you guys to share if you have like an artifact or something that you love and treasure and what you know it means to you and then of course we need to know oh yes tell us about this this is my grandfather's coffee stanley coffee thermos he took it with him every day to work every i've never saw him without it and until he got like 85 his doctors like can't drink coffee anymore and he called me he's like i think i'm gonna die tomorrow and i go why because i can't drink coffee anymore there's no point in living and he was i mean he's 85 he's a farmer he's a postmaster worked with tail off and i when he died this is the one thing i wanted just because it was always right in the front of his truck and uh and a year later my dad died believe it or not and my dad's ashes are in this thermos so this is my dad in here which is crazy people think that's creepy but i love it i've got my dad and my grandpa at my desk every day fantastic starting to work hard yeah and i love how it represents a work ethic right um anytime i want to quit i look at that thermos and i'm like those two dudes would not acquit and i just reminds me to keep going oh that's good to know that you get you want to quit sometimes all the time i want to quit all the time [Music] you know what we do is not easy and um you know if it was easy everybody would do this themselves and we wouldn't have a child highly emotional but we love it yeah so mike do you have like a something that you treasure an artifact or an heirloom that means a lot to you of course you do i do i sure do um i mean i've got certain records that are absolutely priceless to me and then um you know just random things but honestly like it's my wedding photo can't replace that you know that that special feeling and and uh place it holds in my heart it's it's the most important thing to me so ah i love that i love that okay what's yours you don't get off that easy what's yours oh um okay so that's that's unexpected um so the funny thing is like my background i'm a scrapbooker so i did scrapbooking and um like oh my gosh i have so many scrapbooks and um it tends to be my latest like the thing i treasure the most tends to be my latest story that i've shared and so this is an interesting one and it's not necessarily there's not a physical representation but my oldest son just turned 29 and so i thought as a storyteller i wanted to tell stories and um so i created a secret instagram account where i told i recorded myself telling 29 stories and i had this like highlight reel i went to all the places that were important where he went to elementary school preschool where we took the bus the hospital and um and then i in the like the headline i said um i used a line from hamilton who lives who dies who tells your story and i said i do um and so his gift was 29 stories and and i said you have lived 10 585 days and i am here as a witness to talk about your life and so i gave him a qr code for his birthday and he had his phone and he scans it and he looks and he sees this instagram account with all these stories and he just starts you know getting emotional and lost it so i would say my most sort of prized you know artifact or possession is the latest story that i've recorded like something like that so it's an instagram account that is that's awesome what a story that's awesome i love it thank you um so my mom's watching mom you hear what she just did for her son let's get her get going woman she's got a lot of story it was it was an awesome experience and he's the oldest of five so i may have set myself up for when my kids turn 29 they're gonna get something like this and i think that's fine i love it i love i think i think in the ways we tell our stories it doesn't only say what we care about but it also kind of represents it's almost like a tangible piece of our hearts i think so um this has been a delight where can we find where can we stay in touch with you um and what sort of final message do you have as we wrap up this fantastic fun interview so for us a website is mylegacylist.com mylegacylist.com if you sign up for our mailing list we'll send you a bunch of cool stuff not too much about every other month we actually have our 10 conversation starters that we're sending out if you sign up for the the list you get 10 questions that you should ask your grandma and grandpa to get them telling their story um but sign up for that and then all the social media is i am matt paxton i am matt paxton mike what's yours yours is uh legacy list underscore mike yeah legacy list underscore mike and i i'll speak for both of us i mean we just want you to tell the story like just get out there and like once a week tell a story and like walk around the house and just find something you thought was cool and and i don't mean from the last 10 years i mean from your whole life yeah and like just start telling the story and tell your kids sell tell someone it doesn't even have to be a family member just tell someone that'll listen and like you did i mean start putting it online like digitize it i mean anything but just tell your stories i promise you someone cares and you'll be amazed amazed how fun your life gets when you start sharing your stories oh matt i love that i love that mike do you want to like add to that well i'll just piggyback i mean when you start sharing things i think the best part is seeing what your friends and family share back because you'll hear things that you never would have heard otherwise from people that you talk to all the time so i i'd say the more you get you know it's like what was it uh paul mccartney said the love you uh take is equal to the love you make or something like that but um you know you start putting things out there you'll get a lot back and i think i think those stories are just unbelievable oh my goodness you guys are delightful thank you so much for spending time with us and um we can't wait for season two of the legacy list well thank you and thank you family search for supporting us and just being a good partner and um just get curious you guys get curious on whether it's genealogy or family stories or whatever just just start asking questions and your life will get better really cool do this again we can probably do this all night let's do it again

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 1,188

Rating: 4.8857141 out of 5

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Id: k0qbrpmkavA

Length: 53min 9sec (3189 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020