While I never did get good marks in History classes (I have to stop and think sometimes to remember important dates in my OWN life, much less others!), I do love seeing and learning about historical artifacts. As a child (and even as a teen) I always wanted to be an archaeologist, digging and discovering.
What I really love is when I find a horseshoe (or other antique) that comes with a story. It isn’t often that you find the history of a lowly horseshoe, but sometimes you will, and sometimes all you have to do is ask, as some sellers don’t think it’s important to say where they dug the shoe up, or how their grandfather was an award winning farrier back in the day and this was one last shoe he kept hanging above his garage door.
You may be wondering why all of my shoes have tags on them. I tag and number each individual shoe, and write a description of it on an index card so i know where i bought it, everything I know about it, how much I paid, etc. I also draw myself a little picture of it so it is easily recognized when I go to find the individual shoe. I keep the cards organized in a card index.
I hope that with careful record keeping I can safeguard the history of each of my shoes. Unfortunately I didn’t do these things when I first started collecting as a child, but I remember a few details about my favorite shoes.
I have many, many more shoes in my collection (at the moment of writing this I own over 330 shoes). Record keeping helps keep their information organized and readily available. Now if I can just find an easy way to keep the shoes themselves organized 🤔.