So I found this safe in my basement...

A discreet cabinet in the basement...

My wife inherited this old Victorian mansion from her grandfather (who isn't dead yet but isn't living there anymore) and moved in in the summer of 2002, about six months before we started dating. It was her great-grandfather's house before her grandfather owned it, so she's the fourth generation to live there (her mom of course grew up there).
Anyway, the creepy old basement is like a maze, and at one time her great-grandfather was the county coroner, and he used the basement (which was finished at one time) as a doctor's office and a morgue. In one of the rooms of the basement is a row of cabinets, tucked back behind some hardware.
When we married in 2007 I discovered this safe and it's been a point of interest for me ever since.

Open it up and what do you find...

Inside the cabinet is a safe. A Mosler safe. The same Mosler Safe Company that made the safes that were installed in the Mitsui Bank of Hiroshima that were made famous by surviving the atomic blast.
I asked about it and her grandfather couldn't remember the combination. I took a shot at removing the hinges, but those are merely caps. The only way the door will unhinge is if it's open. And this thing weighs probably a good thousand pounds, so it's not going anywhere.
After years of grinning and bearing my curiosity, my wife's grandfather happened to stumble across the combination yesterday while he was going through some old paperwork. He sent it my way.

Finally open!

Good lord, that's a thick door. So let's see what we've got - a drawer, a lock box with another drawer in it, some keys (only two of which appear to have any purpose in here) and some paperwork to the right. Let's take a look and see what treasures we can find.

We'll start with the drawer.

Looks like a matchbox or something. Nothing inside or under the pieces, though.

ZONK

What the hell, Wayne Brady?

Well, let's take a look in the box.

What's in the box?

Nothing!

Absolutely nothing!

Stupid!

Yoooou're soooo stoooooopuuuud!

If you haven't seen UHF and therefore don't get the reference, I'm sorry about your wasted childhood. ;)

Anything else?

Okay, the drawer and lock box were a flop, what about the paperwork?

Interesting.

The big envelope had some interesting stuff in it, and I originally mistook it as paperwork related to my wife's uncle Jack (who's real name was John). Many of them were related to medical exams (to become a doctor). Her great uncle Jack was in the Navy during WWII, and after the war was a pharmacist, so this didn't surprise me.
Then I saw the dates - 1910, 1914, etc. This wasn't Uncle Jack's paperwork, the John being referenced was her great-grandfather. These papers were old, but didn't look to be over a century old. I was shocked. And none of us knew that he had ever gone by the nickname of 'Jack' as well. We learned a lot of new things from this paperwork.

More interesting stuff.

Brought to you by MS Paint - here are some old bank deposit slips from a local municipal bank. I'm not even sure the bank is there anymore, and it's likely all this money is long gone, but suffice it to say we'll be looking into it. One page dated 1954 listed an account balance of $14,000.

Even MORE interesting stuff.

There were also lots of information associated with stocks and bonds, but I'm having a hard time making sense of it. I'm giving all this to my mother-in-law and she's going to have an accountant (and maybe a lawyer) take a look at some of this stuff.

Sorry guys, no gold bars or jewelry or cash, or anything of immediate value, but a lot of neat stuff related to my wife's family that'll give them a glimpse a century into the past.
I'm not gonna lie - there was a little part of me hoping I'd find a wad of cash or something, but oh well, it's no biggie. I may not have gotten rich off my find but I sure did get an awesome safe I can now use for my own stuff. And I can rest easy knowing my shit will survive a nuclear blast, even if I don't. :)