Thrift Store Employee Tracks Down Donor To Return Priceless Family Heirlooms

The prospect of receiving an inheritance from an estate may seem awesome but it can also be exhausting. There’s so much to take care of and it is easy for certain things to fall through the cracks.

This is a lesson that Josef Garrett, an adjunct professor at Colorado State University, recently learned the hard way. His innocent donation turned into something else entirely.

When he donated what he assumed was a suitcase typewriter to a local thrift store, he never could have predicted what would happen next. As it turns out, he had mistakenly given away something that was far more valuable.

The suitcase wasn’t filled with a typewriter at all, but instead it contained priceless family heirlooms. There were dozens of photos and letters, dating back as far as 80 years. An employee with Arc Thrift Store in Arvada, Colorado was responsible for contacting him. They wanted Josef to know the value of what he was giving away.

“[They] said, ‘We’ve got letters from three generations, going back.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that was a mistake,” Josef shared in the video below. This is when he learned that what he’d given away was chock full of photographs and letters. There was even a handwritten letter from his grandmother to his great-parents, providing a closer look at her feelings as she prepared for the birth of Josef’s father.

He’s an anthropology professor by trade but he is also a family man, so it is easy to see why these letters were so important. “Reading some of these letters, I started thinking about, like, oh, this is why this is happening,” he says. “This is how I came to be who I am today because of the action of my grandparents and my parents. It’s really kind of cool to be able to think about that when it all could have been lost.”

Stories like this one are sure to make you wonder if there is anything hiding in any of your items at home. Who knows what treasures could be lurking that we do not even know about?

We are just glad that Josef was able to get these crucial items back. There’s no price that can be put on items with this type of sentimental value.