There were hundreds of lots in this online estate auction. Mostly from the same Newark family. Photographs, letters, business records, calling cards, the works. I could see from the thumbnails that this was Gilded Age money... the good stuff... the stuff that keeps me up nights researching in a fever dream.
I'd done some research before bidding. Industrial family, zinc smelting fortune, multiple generations of wealth. Julia was a published writer. She wrote a book called Cupid Intelligent in the 1880s. That's what sold me. A wealthy woman writer from Newark with a whole archive? Yes.
I could only afford one lot. So I bid my max on the box I wanted most: Julia Anna Nenninger Balbach's papers. I scoured every single photo of every single lot and this one seemed to have the original manuscripts from her books. I couldn't know for sure their full condition or completeness unless I won the auction and took home the prize. It was a risk for a broke hobbyist like me, but I took a chance.
The auction actually took place on New Year's Day, so I got up early and spent the morning watching the bidding go by. $110 plus auction fees plus $80 shipping. Then I waited. It felt like forever but it was probably only two weeks before the boxes showed up.
What I Got
Manuscripts. So many manuscripts. Her complete drafts, revisions, carbon copies of everything. Letters spanning decades. Family photographs. Business correspondence from the smelting company. Her children's papers, her only grandchild's memento mori photo. The poor baby boy died the day of birth and with him, the family line.
And yeah, her published book. Which I later learned was basically a vanity press situation. I think it was the 1800s equivalent of self-publishing on Amazon. She paid to have it printed. That detail makes me like her more, honestly.
What I have is a wealthy woman's entire creative output, preserved because she had the money and space to keep everything, and because someone kept it after she died. Until it ended up in an auction, and then on my dining room floor.
Now What
I've done a rough sort. I know who everyone is. I've started the genealogy work. I keep thinking I should be doing something more systematic with all this, but mostly I just... have it. Forty pounds of someone else's life that I'm now responsible for.
I don't know if I'm writing a book about her or cataloguing an archive or what. Right now I'm just here with all this paper, trying to figure out what the story actually is.
So that's what I'm doing here. Figuring it out in public. Next post I'll probably dig into what she was actually writing about and whether she was any good.
—Launa