I finally found the key to mom's trunk, where she kept various items of personal memorabilia such as newspaper clippings, documents, school photos, greeting cards— the usual hodgepodge of stuff people accumulate. Among other things I found a program for a high school play that one of my aunts was in in 1938. There was also a newspaper clipping about my dad's old girlfriend, from before he met my mom. Why my mom clipped that out and kept it I have no idea. She was odd like that.
But the most interesting thing I found was a box stuffed with envelopes full of old photo negatives. I thought the negatives to mom's photos were long gone, but there they were. Most of them are of the 6 cm square format, from 120 or 620 film. Many of them are probably for photos of which there are no prints. Now I have more reasons to get a scanner, but it will have to be one that scans medium format negatives. It's bound to take a long time to digitize that many negatives, too. There must be several hundred of them. I'm going to have to start shopping for a scanner before I run out of spare cash. Within a few months I won't be able to afford one.