An Introduction

What do you collect?

For me, I’ve collected baseball cards (an obvious entry into collecting for a kid), stamps, coins, arrowheads, collectible card games, fountain pens and even buckeye nuts. My collections have never really amounted to much in size or value but I had fun getting them together and inventorying them. My brother is big into “hunting treasure” which is mostly buried civil war and world war two relics forgotten by time. Somewhere in there I’m pretty sure he has a small collection of fossils and arrowheads as well. The folks also have their own collections they have gathered over the years. The running joke in our family is that mom has collected pretty much every antique juicer in Tennessee and probably parts of Alabama. Being a southern family, there are also pocket knives, arrowheads and other relics of a southern heritage.

At family gatherings there is always a question of where this item came from or who made that basket. As the generations start to die off, there may or may not be a family memory of every relic being handed down or for those found in crawl spaces. As a matter of fact, this past Christmas I received a quilt from my grandmother that my great grandmother or “Mom” had made. While I know Mom made the quilt, I don’t know when she made it, where or what it was originally made for. For all I know, it was just a cold winter. If only there were some record….

So here we are at the beginning of 2015. Not only are we starting a new year but my brother and I have set out on this new venture which is Relic Record. Will had been kicking around this idea of having some web based software to help not only our family members to keep track of their collections but to hopefully help many more collectors and their families keep a good record of the items in their collections.
Since I have a background doing web development work and Will has a background in marketing and is heavily involved in the civil war artifact and metal detecting communities, it seemed like a good fit to make a go at building something. Relic Record is shaping up to be that something.

What we hope to deliver with Relic Record is a simple way for collectors of all ages to keep documentation (photographs, dates, locations and costs) associated with their collections up to date and in a central, easily accessible location. Beyond that, we want to build a community where collectors can choose to share some (or all) of their finds with other like-minded collectors.

Check out relicrecord.com for more information on our plans and be sure to sign up to be an early adopter of the software.

Happy Hunting,
Mitchell