Sarah Winchester's Financial Records, 1878 - 1885

Sarah Winchester's Financial Records, 1878 - 1885

Leib Family Collection

Sarah Winchester's Finances

This is an image from the Samuel Leib Collection of a notebook recording stock purchases and positions from 1882. This notebook helps provide additional insight to how Sarah Winchester and Samuel Leib would handle her finances. The range of their transaction amounts indicates the amount of abundant wealth that Sarah Winchester had that was disposable. Furthermore, this amount of transactions indicates how difficult it is to visualize her abundance of wealth as well as the limitation of the Winchester Mystery House as an indicator of her wealth. The inability to visualize her abundant wealth contributes to the difficulty in understanding her wealth in terms of public memory because of how difficult it would be to reference her amount of wealth to a material that is not visually seen in the house tour unless converted to present amounts.

Furthermore, this particular item demonstrates the importance of Samuel Leib in aiding to manage her finances. His omission from the house tour despite this item proving how helpful his services were highlights the issue of democratic representation from the material objects during the house tour. Because, particular servants or workers were not mentioned during the house tour, unless their tasks involved materials that were easily observable like the laundry and not more difficult materials to locate such as the financial records.

Source:
Samuel Leib Papers. "Leib Family Collection". Historysanjose.org. https://historysanjose.pastperfectonline.com/archive/B921DEAA-CB30-41B4-B055-219397202724

historysanjose.org

Kevin Thich,
Dominick Ott

1878 - 1885