Why am I doing this?

One of my favorite historic sites is Liberty Hall Museum in Union, New Jersey, built for the state's first democratically-elected governor, William Livingston.

Occupied by one of New Jersey's most influential political families for more than 200 years, the home hosted a litany of names from your high school history book. Alexander Hamilton stayed there while he was attending school nearby. Supreme Court Justice John Jay married one of the young women born there. A very portly President Taft allegedly sat down in a simple wooden chair that's now displayed in the front hall. The first President Bush stopped by for a visit.

It's considered a crossroads of history, just on the basis of who's walked through the front door, but famous guests are only one aspect of what makes Liberty Hall so remarkable.

What's just as fascinating is that the family doesn't seem to have ever had a yard sale or tossed out old papers. The home became a museum in 1995, and the family left so much random stuff in closets and the attic that the staff has been making amazing historical finds ever since.

Some of the stuff is really remarkable, like a letter written to the family by George Washington and found in a child's scrapbook. Other items – like coal bills from 1873 – are more banal but still fascinating in their own ways. When your family never moves, you tend to (inadvertently, even) accumulate some interesting stuff. You store mundane detritus, forget about it and then when someone else finds it YEARS later, it becomes interesting again.

That’s the story of my parents’ home and my attempts to clean it out. We never hosted a president or a founding father, but the family's sedentary nature has had pretty much the same effect. They’ve been there for more than 50 years, and my mother always had a hard time tossing stuff.

It never reached hoarder level – it was just clutter and paperwork from years of volunteer work and hobbies, mostly my mom’s. Occasionally Dad would get frustrated and attempt to tidy up, but Mom would get angry if he threw stuff away. My sister and I have discovered that he packed the clutter away in boxes so Mom's stuff would always be available if she wanted it. Predictably, after being annoyed with him for a day or two, she never bothered to open the boxes. Most likely, she just forgot any of it was there. And Dad never spirited the boxes away to the curb. Maybe he forgot, himself.

That's the bulk of what I'm sharing here, but there's more. Add stuff from at least five long-deceased relatives which ended up at the house - both sets of grandparents and my uncle – and you get items that go back a century. Some of it is fascinating, some is head scratchingly weird, some is genuinely funny, even if you have to squint and turn your head a little to see how.

This is my 20th century dig. Every box contains new discoveries.