I love history. It’s why I majored in the subject in college.

I love discovering things about the past, especially as they pertain to me.

So buying a house that was built in 1900 with a lot of things to discover about it has, as you can imagine, been a very exciting experience for me.

First Brian found a newspaper from 1952 tucked away in the kitchen. I loved this ad in particular:

(I wonder how that worked out for them, given that almost 60 years later, I’m pretty sure facial hair still exists.)

Next we found a church bulletin from 1979 under the carpet in our bedroom closet. It was in, like, pristine condition. Seriously, if you told me that thing came off the presses yesterday, I would’ve believed you. I forgot to take a photo of it, but it was fun to see the businesses that advertised in the bulletin… many are still around to this day!

The coolest artifacts we uncovered, though, were the ones that gave us some insight into the history of our home and its former inhabitants.

There was this shelf in the kitchen that looked like it had been put there within the last 20-30 years. It certainly didn’t look like it was much older than that, and Brian and I wanted to move the refrigerator over to where the shelf was hanging… so Brian took it down.

And when he did, we realized that it had been there a lot longer than 20-30 years.

There was some really, really, really old wallpaper, as well as a lot of things that must have fallen behind the shelf over the years… loose change, paper clips, threading needles, bobby pins, buttons…

And also these relics that give us a peek into our house’s past:

I love that we found these things. They tie us to the past, to the people who lived in our home years and years and years ago.

You never know what you’re going to learn about your home when you look behind a shelf in the kitchen.

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