 This is an inventory, an inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattel of a man named Thomas Springer in 1804 and an inventory is a list of the possessions of someone that's taken after that person dies. It's usually the head of a household because that's who owns the possession. Therefore, most of the inventories we have are inventories of men and it's a document that's created by the fact that wealth in the late 18th, early 19th, century is not so much in the form of things in the bank or things in the stock market, but real estate and actual movable goods. So when someone dies, the county court points appraisers, local men, to go out and look at an estate, see what's there listed and estimate its value and these documents are of immense interest to people who want to know about the possessions and the living standards of people in the past, particularly about people who aren't famous or who things things were not saved. You can get a sense of what did this man own at least at the time of his death, what was in his household. Thomas Springer is someone I got interested in, his possession is something I got interested in as a museum curator. It was my job to figure out what this man owned because we at the Smithsonian owned the house that he lived in. This is a house built in the 1790s and it was built as logs and it was collected some time ago. My job was to go back and find out everything I could about the people who lived in this house, not just Thomas Springer, but his wife Elizabeth. It's hard to find out about Elizabeth. She doesn't have the inventory, although there may be hints in here about her life too.