It's a buyers' market now.

[grasswire]

NEW YORK (AP) — The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, like the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."

Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills — and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.

More at the link:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jmVfjiFvKMMmnD72pAgqzkLBW4CwD90BO5EO0

[Stinky The Clown]

1. That's awful. I get all sappy and teary when I read this kind of stuff

Sparkly and I used to lament going to flea markets and finding certain types of items ......... like baby photo albums, retirement watches, the memorabilia of significant life events. A model car collection from the 60s for sale at an estate sale. What happened to the kid who built them; he'd have to be abut my age? Is he dead? Estranged?

More than a buyer's market, that's a heartbreaking market.

:(

[grasswire]

2. wow, I agree

Something that always bothers me is the family portraits that are unidentifiable. Pretty brides from the 1940s -- no one bothered to identify her. Grandpas, sweet babies.....all unidentifiable.

If they only had names on the back, someone could start a big project of putting the photos on the Internet and family members could download the photos for posterity or pay a small price for the original. I often think I oughta buy every portrait I see where the person is named, just to keep them out of the town dump.

[Kat45]

4. People don't usually put names on the pictures; they know everyone then.

I recently inherited boxes and boxes of photos from my mother. I'm sure many of them are from my childhood, but I've also found pictures from the forties and earlier. It's wild seeing pictures of my mother in her 20s that I've never seen before, and I certainly don't know who most of the other people in the photos are. There are some beautiful portraits, some wedding pictures. But I've vowed that I'm not going to look through them all until after I've gone through everything else in the house; I'll never get to that stuff if I start with the pictures. And I'd swear she never threw anything out: I've already found her high school report card, a dance card from her prom, postcards from WWII, the greeting cards she got at her wedding. I don't know if she ever threw a card out!

[brer cat]

3. I agree. What kills me are the family Bibles.

Family history filled out by hand for generations.

My sister and I have been antique dealers (about to close our shop) and over the years we have had so many people coming in to sell their "treasures" to pay a water bill or medical bill, etc. It is heartbreaking, and it is only going to get much worse. Unfortunately, the retail market now is in the pits, so they will really get pennies on the dollar.

[grasswire]

5. preserve those family bibles

I really think there ought to be an effort to set up some kind of repository for posterity -- as I mentioned in an earlier post. Someone definitely ought to get all that info and the lost photos on the Internet. It would be a huge undertaking, but could be funded by donations.

[sufrommich]

6. I feel the same way about personal

stuff at flea markets,it's sad. I once bought a house that was being sold by the son of the deceased woman who owned the house.He left a pile of trash in the garage which included her diaries which spanned a huge part of her lifetime(from the 1920s to the 1960s)from her college days,through her husbands service in WW2,her sons very difficult conception and birth(he was much loved and an only child) to her husbands death.There was tons of ephemera from her life including cards from her wedding and baby shower,letters from her husband when he was stationed overseas,etc.I kept everything that seemed important , I couldn't stand the idea of this woman's life ending up at the dump.
Who throws away that kind of stuff?