You mentioned something in your post about looking for old store ledgers from a store, and not being able to find them. A few years ago, I was passing by an old country store that was being dismantled. There was a burn pile nearby, and it was about to rain. There were also a large number of the store's ledgers in the pile. I stopped and picked up as many as I could easily get to and brought them home. Next time I passed, the pile had been burnt. A few years later, I found a post on a website by someone looking for an ancestor from my area. I found him listed as one of the customers of the store. No one else ever found anything to indicate he'd ever been around here. (The clerk at that particular store was my grandfather - he ran a tab there, too, so I could see everything he bought each year until the crop came in.) Those old ledgers are an invaluable source of information, and should be preserved, but as a general rule they're lost forever. Almost as sad as old men a hundred years from now yearning for the good ole days of Wal-Mart.