People Shared Their Strangest Family 'Heirlooms', And Some Are Just Too Much

A woman told the tale on reddit of an inheritance that’d been passed down through her husband’s family. It was a full-sized stuffed emu. These flightless Australian birds can grow up to 5 feet tall and adults weigh around 100 pounds. So this is no small item that you could stick at the back of a shelf. It seems the woman’s none too enamored with the heirloom but feels that she has to keep it anyway.

This charming heirloom consists of two metal items swallowed by family kids, with an accompanying explanatory note. One’s a safety pin swallowed by May one day at 11:00 a.m. Alarmingly, it didn’t reappear until 8:30 a.m. the next day. The second’s a nail consumed by Will in 1899. How long that took to come out isn’t recorded.

This heirloom has a significance that’s intensely moving. A woman inherited a pair of earrings from her mother that had originally belonged to her mom’s aunt. The aunt’s husband had been one of those with the harrowing but heroic task of liberating a Nazi concentration camp at the end of WWII. A grateful survivor had later gifted him the jewelry. A poignant story indeed.

This tale comes from a late father. One of his children was going over his dad’s belongings when some blue stones that looked potentially valuable dropped from an envelope. The father had been in Bali during his late teens and had purchased some sapphires there. He’d then had them checked out by a jeweler who told him they were fake but offered to buy the items. Later on, though, the guy’s kids found out they were actually real! That jeweler was a con artist.

One woman inherited an ivy plant. Hardly exciting, you might think — until you know the back story. The woman’s great-great-grandmother was anxious to bring something living from her homeland, Norway, when she immigrated to America. So she smuggled an ivy cutting hidden in her underwear. And now the descendant of that Norwegian ivy stem is in the hands of a fifth generation!

This pretty La Tausca pearl necklace came down from great-grandparents. They’re actually sophisticated imitation pearls created by a New York jeweler on Fifth Avenue. But what makes the heirloom priceless to the family is the note that came with it. It records that: “These pearls were given by Les Johnston to his bride Edith Simpson when they were married [on] October 10, 1923.”

During the heady days of early space exploration, Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth’s orbit and travel to the Moon. One woman inherited a fascinating artifact from her grandpa, who was an engineer on the project. It’s a token acknowledging his involvement, made from metal that was used on the Apollo 8 mission.

Some of us might turn up our noses at this particular heirloom. It’s a bottle containing what seems to be a grey stone, and there’s a label that reads: “John’s Appendix. 1907.” John was the recipient’s great-grandfather, and it turns out that his appendix was something rather special. That’s because he was apparently among the earliest people in the U.K. to benefit from an appendectomy. So it’s actually a piece of medical history.

This puzzling inheritance could be interpreted in various ways. It’s simply a list consisting of 100 names. But the person who inherited this document has no idea who the people referred to are or why 87 of the names have a red line through them. Perhaps a Christmas card list where people who didn’t reciprocate were crossed off each year? Or could it be something more sinister? We’ll leave that to your imagination.

Prison rings are pieces of jewelry made by people serving a jail sentence, using whatever material that’s to hand. For obvious reasons, that’s unlikely to be any precious metal such as such as gold or silver. Instead the rings are fashioned from items such as plastic pens or toothbrushes. Whether or not the deceased relative who left this heirloom had been in prison is unknown.

Christmas decorations are a great way to brighten up the holiday season. But how many of us want to be saddled with a 4-foot tall stuffed Santa Claus? Thankfully, the owner was in fact smitten by the strange Santa model from an early age. So when her grandmother passed it on as a wedding gift, she was delighted. And happily her children like it, too.

This is the story of a boy who was raised in poverty by his grandma in Alabama. Despite the lack of money, though, she managed to scrape the cash together to get the kid a baseball glove. Yet there wasn’t enough for a ball, so she made one from homemade threads. And now it’s been handed down to the next generation.

This woman inherited a tool kit from a relative who’d taken part in the Civil War. The beautiful wooden chest contains a saw and various other instruments, including a thumb tourniquet. This last item gives a big clue to the kit’s purpose. It was a set of medical instruments for amputations on the battlefield. Gruesome.

This heirloom could be described as an object lesson into how to weird out your grandchildren. Grandma bequeathed a collection of old cigarettes to her descendants, neatly arranged in an old Sucrets container. Strange enough on its own. But not as strange as the fact that each cigarette sports the signature of someone whom she’d gone on a date with.

A Frenchwoman owns a highly unusual set of clothing passed on to her by her grandmother. All of the items were made from WWII parachute silk. The grandmother lived on a remote farm in France during the war, and it was a spot where many British parachutists landed. So their parachutes ended up providing the unusual source of the dressmaking fabric.

This person describes his inheritance from his dad with a wry sense of humor. The heirloom in question is a container marked “Pens That Don’t Work.” As the son points out, “I guess if Pop ever needed a pen that didn’t work, he would know right where to find one.”

This person inherited a couple of eggs. But not just any old eggs. These were a pair of ostrich eggs, so they were extra-large, as you can imagine. It seems that the items came from a Scottish forefather who’d fought for the British Army in South Africa in the late 19th century. Fortunately, the contents of the eggs had been removed. And as a bonus, the shells had been painted.

This woman inherited something truly intriguing: her grandmother’s deputy-sheriff identity card. The grandma was Earlyne Thomas and she worked for San Bernardino County in California. It seems that at least part of her duties included wireless operation, since appended to the I.D. card is a set of detailed instructions about radio use.

According to its current holder, this raincoat dates back to WWII. It was worn by a prisoner who attempted a jail-break. The present-day owner records that his grandfather was a guard at the prison and foiled the escape by grasping the felon’s coat. The warder then took possession of the item, and it’s been passed down through the family ever since.

A granddaughter uncovered some lurid family secrets when sorting out her grandma’s belongings. A wedding license for her grandfather — but the woman named wasn’t the grandmother. The license was dated just half a year before the grandpa had married the actual grandma. According to the granddaughter, her granddad had been rejected by the mystery women and then married her grandmother instead. Let’s hope no bigamy was involved.

When going through their late father’s effects, a family came across a jar containing some sand. Mysterious in itself, certainly, but it was the label on the jar that caused genuine alarm. It read: “Fused sand from first nuclear bomb test, Nevada.” The family contacted an expert with a Geiger counter who confirmed that the substance was indeed extremely radioactive. Yikes!

This woman’s grandma worked in a school as a nurse, a perfectly honorable and useful profession. But for some reason she hung on to some thoroughly unpleasant mementos from her working life. Index cards. With dead lice stuck on. Helpfully, each card explained what type of lice was attached. Thanks for the information.

It’s probably true that most of us don’t think of our grandmothers in terms of how hot they were in their younger days. But one person came across her grandma’s old high-school yearbook and was confronted with undeniable evidence that she’d been classed as a total boy-magnet. Indeed, she’d been voted cutest in her year. And that put dear grandmama in a whole new light.

So imagine for a moment that your late grandparents were apparently faithful, God-fearing Christians. The last thing you’d expect to see among their belongings would be a stash of literature and artifacts related to devil worship. But that’s just what happened to one BuzzFeed contributor. She described how she found a haul of black-magic literature plus other strange stuff such as knives, odd powders, and even clumps of hair. Disturbing.

If you’ve got the space in your home, a piano’s a rather lovely thing to inherit. And a BuzzFeed contributor was bequeathed one that’d first belonged to her great-grandmother. The great-grandma had apparently performed in cinemas during the silent movie era. She’d finally scrimped enough money to buy her own instrument, and it’d since been handed down through the family.

This travel box had once belonged to the great-great-uncle of the person who later inherited it. And it wasn’t just any old trunk. It was an item of luggage used by a tightrope artist. Apparently, this uncle had done that impossibly romantic thing — he’d left home and signed up with a circus. He performed as a member of the Delmore Trio, who were apparently “wire artists supreme.”

This four-leaf clover passed down to a great-grandchild is a poignant symbol of a long-ago romance. For it was picked by the great-grandfather for his new wife. The couple had it preserved in resin so that the clover would survive as a permanent memento of young love. Apparently, it’s almost as green and fresh-looking now as on the day it was plucked from the ground.

An old copy of a newspaper might not sound like much of a bequest. But this particular front page from 1865 has massive historical significance. It details one of the most tragic moments in American history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, the page was published a fortnight after Lincoln’s murder, which shows the much slower pace of the news cycle back in the mid-19th century.

One person inherited a wide-ranging collection of books from her great-grandpa, who seems to have been something of a political radical back in the days of WWII. One of the tomes had a striking hand-written message to his wife inside it. It reads: “Dedicated to Kay — upon awaiting my induction into the service of the imperialist masters and their war of extinction. February 3, 1943.”

While it’s true that a tire lever can be a handy thing to own, it probably isn’t what many of us expect as an inheritance. But that’s just what one person had handed down to them from their grandpa. He served as a mechanic in World War One, repairing artillery guns. And he survived to tell the tale along with his tire tool.

A person writing on BuzzFeed related the story of how his great-great-grandfather penned a book about wartime strategy and tactics. He posted a copy of his work to Winston Churchill. And the former prime minister was polite enough to reply, though he didn’t seem to think much of the book. But Churchill’s letter was preserved and has now passed through five generations of this family.

A great-grandfather’s meat grinder might seem like a rather peculiar thing to pass on down through the generations. And the tale gets worse when you learn the significance of this particular kitchen utensil. Because it turns out that this was the very meat grinder with which great-grandpa chopped his own thumb off. Presumably by accident.

This grandpa had maintained that he’d avoided the worst of WWII by serving in California during his time in the armed forces. But his family later discovered a revealing stash of documents, photos, and even his dog tag. They showed that in truth he was a medic in France during the war. What’s more, he was involved in the ferocious six-week Battle of the Bulge during 1944 and 1945.

A reddit poster told the grisly tale of her great-great-uncle’s bequest. Apparently, this unfortunate man had been severely injured when a bucking horse struck him on the head. The force of the blow actually fractured his skull, so slivers of it had to be removed to save his life, an operation that succeeded. Those bone remnants were then preserved in a container and passed down through the generations.

James V took the Scottish crown in 1513, the year after he was born. He remained on the throne until his death in 1542, a month after a heavy defeat at the hands of the English. Somehow, a rib allegedly from the king’s remains was bequeathed in a will written by a Scotsman called Dr. Robert B. Honeyman, who died in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1824. Where the rib eventually ended up is unknown.

In 2012 William Petzel responded to a question on Quora asking about unusual heirlooms. He described how his father had served with the U.S. Navy during WWII. The sailor had acquired various munitions including machine-gun rounds and a couple of Bofors shells. He’d later used them to create a lamp that’d eventually been left to Mr. Petzel. Let’s hope that the aging ammunition’s safe.

First question: what’s an attestation paper? Well, it was a document that men had to fill in and sign when they volunteered for service with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force during World War One. This particular form, used by Victor Matthews, had been passed down until it ended up in the hands of his great-great-grandson. Matthews was aged 21 when he signed the paper in 1915, swearing on oath to “bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth.”

This trunk that’d belonged to the current owner’s great-great-grandmother is a fascinating example of family history. It was the luggage that this woman brought with her from Ireland when she emigrated to America early in the 20th century. The interior of the container was lined with old newspapers, including one from 1910.

A woman was lucky enough to inherit more than 30 items of French haute couture made by the famous fashion house of Chanel. The bequest included everything from purses to jewelry as well as clothes. Her aunt had worked for Chanel and passed the items on to her niece, who still wears them and thinks them “priceless.”

A human brain in a jar’s the stuff of Hollywood, such as the 1983 Steve Martin movie The Man with Two Brains. Alternatively, it’s something you might find in a science lab. But somebody was actually bequeathed one of these organs, preserved in liquid in a glass jar. It’d come from their grandfather. Fortunately, he wasn’t a mad serial killer but a science professor.