A woman found a 130-year-old time capsule under her floorboards after a chance encounter with a woman she met on Facebook Marketplace.

Madeline Goodwin, 26, had no idea there was a treasure trove hiding in her Victorian home when she bought the house four years ago.

She thought she’d just be ridding herself of a side table when a woman she found through the online platform visited her home in Swindon, Wiltshire.

But the stranger from the internet revealed she used to live in the house and they’d built up a collection of keepsakes since the family moved in in the 1890s.

Madeline said: ‘I gave the woman our postcode and she said she used to live on the street, so I gave her our specific address and she said she used to live in our house.

‘When she came to collect the table, she told us about the history of the house.

‘Since we bought the property four years ago, there have been lots of renovation works, so we were showing the lady these around the home.

‘That’s when she told us about the time capsule her family had left in the foundations of the building underneath the floor boards.

‘Her family had been adding to the capsule until they left the property in 2007 – but she was very allusive and wanted us to find it ourselves.’

Tucked under the third floorboard in the under-stairs cupboard, Madeline found an old metal tin container.

Inside was a penny from 1901, a cigarette packet, a hat, a bible, and a letter, added by various people over the span of more than a century.

The woman who revealed the hiding spot had added a newspaper and a DVD when they sold the house.

‘Though unfortunately the weather had gotten to the ammunition box – so the letter from this lady’s family was illegible.

‘We also need to find a CD player as there is a burnt DVD disk on there – but we don’t have anything to play it on.

‘So we have to track down a way of playing it.

‘There were such random things and it was quite weird because the day the lady came last week was also four years to the day my partner and I had moved into the house.

‘What are the chances? It was so strange that it all aligned.’

Now Madeline plans to add to the capsule and leave it as a treat to future owners of the house, where she lives with her partner.

But they’ll move the contents to a more resilient, sealable container to keep them better preserved.

She said: ‘We’ve already started thinking of what we might add.

‘We still have all of the original Victorian doors still in the property and each has a different door handle, so we were thinking of adding one of those to the capsule.

‘We could also leave a USB too with images and maybe songs.’

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Danny Rigg

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