I can tell you in the late 1960s before we became interested in genealogy, on weekend drives my husband and I visited abandoned buildings including school houses in North Dakota and in the furnaces and school stoves were found remenents of school documents that had been burned. No one had thought to save any of those for future generations. At least these people you are speaking of left photocopies. Buildings had been left exactly as they had been vacated...desks still in place, books in book shelves covered in mold and this was true of a church. It still had the moldy books in the pews and the organ that was gathering mold. I agree any items such as these should be given to state libraries and/or museums for retention if they are in the conditon to be done so. The items we saw were past this stage. Earline in Oregon Member of Columbia Gorge Genealogical Society c/o The Dalles/Wasco County Public Library 722 Court Street The Dalles, Oregon 97058 http://community.oregonlive.com/cc/genealogy Browse http://historysavers.com/orwasco/ recently updated information regarding Wasco County - Links are at the bottom of page http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail