When I was a kid, if I had contraband items that I didn't want my parents to see (dirty magazines, firecrackers, booze, etc.), I hid it in a secret spot in our garage. But why hide something in a garage when you can hide it a tree?

That's what someone apparently did in Vermont, where a crew of Earth Week clean-up volunteers recently found an old VHS cassette hidden inside the hollow of a tree. Inside the cassette were several military medals (shown above), along with some commemorative coins and a Civil War pay stub. As you can see, the medals were attached to little price cards, which suggests that they were stolen from a dealer.

The volunteers who found the medals turned them over to the local police, who in turn contacted the group Purple Hearts Reunited, which is devoted to returning lost military medals to their rightful owners. They were able to return one of the medals — Robert Gene Woody’s 1945 Good Conduct Medal — to Woody's son, Myron Gene Woody. It turns out that that Myron had a complicated relationship with his father and knows very little about his military service, so the medal will help provide a more tangible connection to that part of his life. You can get the full story here.

(My thanks to James Poisso for letting me know about this one.)

The wooden case you see above was recently found in the trash by someone on Reddit. It's large — 29" by 38" — and had all sorts of goodies inside, including hand-drawn maps, bizarre depictions of extraterrestrial visitations, and technical drawings (for all of the images below, you can click to enlarge):

There's more — a lot more. And it was all found in a box that was left in the trash! Amazing. You can get the full scoop here.

In other PermaRec-ish news:

• A Civil War general's Medal of Honor was found inside a book at a church fundraising sale. Further info here.

• A Canadian man has found a message in a bottle dating back to 1906, but he refuses to open the bottle.

That's all for now. Sorry for the lengthy break between posts — it's good to be back. More soon.

(Big thanks to Adam Brodsky and James Poisso for their contributions.)

Here's yet another story of lost military medals being found and then returned to their rightful owner. In this case, the medals were won during World War II by a soldier named Hyman Markel, who was killed toward the end of the war while his wife was seven months' pregnant. So that child, Hyla Merin, never knew her father, and her mother rarely talked about him because the memories were too painful for her.

Fast forward to last October, when the manager of a California apartment complex found a box containing letters and a Purple Heart in an old storage locker. He got in touch with a group that operates as a lost-and-found service for military medals. That group soon figured out that the Purple Heart had belonged to Markel, the WWII soldier. His widow -- the one who'd been pregnant at the time of his death -- had lived in the California apartment building in the 1960s but had apparently left the box behind.

The widow is now deceased, but her daughter -- Hyla Merin, the one who never got to know her father -- is now the proud owner of his Purple Heart, along with several other medals awarded to her father. That's her on the right in the picture at the top of this entry. You can read more details here.

At least two local news stations in California produced segments on this story. You can see them here:

(My thanks to Roger Faso for pointing me toward this story.)

What you see above are two British World War I medals that were awarded to a man named Joseph Brown, who died in 1967. The medals were recently inherited by a friend of Brown's family named David Gillespie, who works at the UK's National Archives. Gillespie never knew Brown but wanted to learn more about the man whose medals he now owned, so he did some research, consulted with various family members, and came up with an account of Brown's military career.

As Permanent Record stories go, this one is fairly standard stuff. The medals weren't found objects, and Gillespie already knew the identity of the man behind them, so no serious detective work was required, and there were no major revelations. So why am I bothering to write about this storyline? Because I'm fascinated by the ribbons attached to the medals. They're so colorful and bright -- the one on the right looks almost tie-dyed!

My response to the ribbons made me realize that we (or at least I) tend to visualize World War I exclusively in black-and-white, maybe with sepia-toned accents, which has the effect of making it seem less real, more like a fable. The presence of color -- especially bright, vibrant color as seen in those ribbons -- has a completely transformative effect on my perception of the that period in history. Interesting.

By coincidence, I happen to own an old ribbon catalog. It's from the 1940s, so it's not nearly as old as Brown's medals. Still, it has some interesting stories to tell, which I wrote about in an article for the very wonderful Cabinet magazine several years ago. If you're curious, you can see that here.

(My thanks to Jacob Sherman for pointing me toward this one.)

At the top of the page is a Purple Heart medal; beneath that is a photo of Army Pvt. Corrado Piccoli, who was awarded a Purple Heart during World War II before being killed in action later in the war.

Pvt. Piccoli and his Purple Heart are at the center of a really interesting report that ran on NPR on July 6. It's about a 31-year-old Vermonter named Zac Fike, who likes to seek out old military medals (in antiques stores, on eBay, etc.) and then tries return them to the soldiers' families. In the case of Pvt. Piccoli's Purple Heart, Fike was able to track down Piccoli's sister, who's now 85 years old, and return the medal to her. (Audio of the NPR story, along with a text version, is available here.)

This is, of course, very Permanent Record. As I listened to the NPR story, many of the details sounded so familiar to me. When Fike first contacted Pvt. Piccoli's sister, for example, she was initially suspicious of him, which is the same response I often get when contacting the family of a Manhattan Trade School student. By the end of the story, however, the sister tells Fike, "We were very fortunate that you were the one who ended up with the Purple Heart. You're part of our family now." I'm happy to say I've been on the receiving end of that type of sentiment as well, and it's a very humbling thing.

I don't mean to equate a report card's significance with that of a Purple Heart. But they both serve as powerful reminders that a simple object can carry stories, stir memories, and even serve as a conduit for intimacy between strangers. And like all lost items that become found, they can trigger the impulse to bring that wayward object back to where it belongs.

(Special thanks to Kirsten Hively for letting me know about the NPR story.)

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Finigan Update: I've now written several blog entries about the Finigan family of Darby, Pennsylvania, because I ended up with a bunch of their receipts, invoices, and other paperwork from the 1940s. In my last entry, I noted that Harold Finigan, who had established a tradition of hanging Christmas decorations in Darby, was likely deceased by now, and I wondered if anyone was now putting up the decorations in his stead.

That prompted the following note from reader Scott Jackson:

I asked a former co-worker about this. She's lived in Darby since the 1960s. She wrote back, "After Mr. Finigan died in 2005, there was a fire and the store that the family owned burned down. Everything in the store was destroyed, along with many of the decorations that Mr. Finigan put up. Darby is not the same place it used to be, which is very sad."

Too bad. But thanks for the info, Scott.