Karen Baker runs the Yolo Food Bank in Northern California’s Yolo County, which she describes as the most food-insecure county in the state. When CBS News California Investigates told her, on camera, that California had been sitting on money that belonged to her organisation, she asked one question: was it really hers? It was.

Tens of millions of Americans are in the same position, without a journalist on hand to tell them.

Where the money comes from

Every US state runs an unclaimed property program, which is essentially a lost and found for cash. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, the body that coordinates those programs across all fifty states, estimates that about one in seven Americans has something waiting. Searching costs nothing.

Nothing glamorous, mostly. Dormant savings accounts, uncashed payroll cheques, utility deposits from a flat someone moved out of in 2009, insurance payouts nobody told the family about, share dividends posted to an address three moves ago, and the contents of safe deposit boxes whose renters died or forgot.

Companies do not get to keep this stuff. State law obliges banks, insurers and other holders to hand it over once an account has gone quiet for a set period, typically three years in California, as the State Controller’s unclaimed property division explains. The state then holds it. There is no deadline to claim, and no fee.

The scale of the pile

California alone is minding about $15 billion in unclaimed property, per the State Controller’s Office, spread across tens of millions of individual records. New York is worse, or better, depending on your perspective: the Office of the New York State Comptroller oversees $19 billion in unclaimed funds, some of it dating back to 1943, and returned $504 million of it in a single fiscal year.

Nationally, the numbers move. NAUPA’s own annual report put total returns at $4.49 billion to Americans in fiscal 2024. That sounds like a lot until you set it against what is still sitting there.

What the states do while they wait

So what happens to the money while it waits to be claimed? In many states, it flows straight into general operations, and the state keeps whatever it earns until someone comes looking.

Citing the California Legislative Analyst’s Office and state budget documents, CBS News reported that unclaimed property is one of California’s top General Fund revenue sources, generating around $1 billion a year, while the state has returned roughly 3.5 per cent of what it holds. The original sum comes back when the owner claims it. The interest does not.

That reporting comes from a single news investigation focused largely on one state, not a national audit.

Washington notices

Sam Liccardo and Mike Lawler agree on very little. Liccardo is a Democrat, Lawler a Republican, and together they have introduced the Safeguarding Americans’ Fairly Earned Retirement Act, which would sharply limit when states can take custody of securities, digital assets and investment accounts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has separately written to NAUPA requesting state-by-state data on how these systems work and how the rules are changing.

Whether any of that passes is anyone’s guess. The databases are already open.

Where the records sit

NAUPA’s search hub links out to every participating state’s official database, alongside MissingMoney.com, the multi-state tool covering 49 states, several Canadian provinces and Puerto Rico. Hawaii runs its own system separately.

Property is reported by the company holding it, which means records often sit in a state the owner left years ago.

Old savings bonds now follow the same route. The Treasury retired its Treasury Hunt tool on 30 September 2025, and unredeemed bonds are handled through state unclaimed property offices instead.

A market has grown up around all this. Private recovery firms, legal in most states, charge a percentage to locate money that sits in the same public databases the states publish for free.

A dollar surrendered to a state in 1994 comes back as a dollar. Not a dollar plus thirty years of compounding, not a dollar adjusted for what groceries cost now, just the dollar. Whoever holds it in the meantime is the only party earning anything.

This article is journalism, not financial or legal advice. Unclaimed property rules, dormancy periods and claims procedures vary by state and change over time. Anyone dealing with a substantial claim, an estate, or a disputed entitlement should consult a qualified professional.

The post American states are holding tens of billions of dollars in forgotten bank accounts, uncashed cheques and insurance payouts, and anyone can search their name for free to see whether some of that money belongs to them appeared first on Space Daily.

For $995 you could buy a decent second-hand lawnmower, a mid-range mattress, or, if a government spreadsheet has a bad day, a piece of Apollo 11 with moon dust still caught in its seams.

That last one happened. In February 2015, an online auction held on behalf of the US Marshals Service listed a white zippered pouch stamped “Lunar Sample Return”. Nancy Lee Carlson of Inverness, Illinois, bid $995 and won. She knew it had flown on something. What she did not know was that it had ridden along on the first crewed landing on the Moon.

How a moon bag ended up in a garage in Kansas

Blame starts with Max Ary, who ran the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson from 1976 to 2002 and was convicted in November 2005 on twelve federal counts, including theft of government property, wire fraud and money laundering. Investigators searching his garage two years earlier had found a box, and the bag was inside it. As documented by The Hutchinson News, Ary was ordered to pay more than $132,000 in restitution for the space artefacts he had taken, a mix of property belonging to NASA and the museum itself. He always maintained he had simply muddled his own collection with theirs.

His forfeited property went to auction to cover the bill. That is where the mix-up happened. Per the Associated Press, government officials later said two lunar bags had been merged into a single entry when their inventory numbers were combined on spreadsheets. One was from Apollo 17. The other had been to the Sea of Tranquility, and nobody caught the difference before the gavel came down.

What the fabric was hiding

Carlson did the sensible thing and posted the pouch to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for authentication.

Terrible idea, as it turned out. Curators tested the cloth, found lunar material embedded in the fibres, and established that the pouch had served as the outer decontamination bag around the first rocks Neil Armstrong scooped up during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Then NASA kept it, arguing the bag was government property that should be on public display, not sitting in someone’s living room, and asking the Justice Department to reverse the forfeiture.

Carlson sued. Twice, in two states.

The ruling nobody at NASA wanted

In December 2016, Judge J. Thomas Marten of the US District Court for Kansas ruled that Carlson was “a good faith purchaser, in a sale conducted according to law,” as reported by Robert Pearlman at collectSPACE. Marten went out of his way to say NASA had done nothing wrong here, and that the bag only mattered at all because of what NASA’s own people had pulled off in 1969. He also said he had no power to unwind a sale that had already gone through. Space.com later reported that NASA handed the bag back in February 2017.

Sold at Sotheby’s, well short of the estimate

Sotheby’s offered the pouch on 20 July 2017, 48 years to the day after Armstrong used it. NPR put the hammer price at $1.5 million, or $1,812,500 once Sotheby’s premium was added, which sounds enormous until you notice the house had estimated $2 million to $4 million. The buyer stayed anonymous.

Plenty of people thought the sale should never have happened at all. Michelle Hanlon of For All Moonkind, a group campaigning to protect the Apollo landing sites, said in a statement carried by Smithsonian magazine that the bag belonged in a museum where the world could share in the achievement it represents. Carlson told CBS News she decided to sell because she no longer felt it was safe in her home.

The dust went on to have its own career

NASA’s testing had lifted particles off the bag onto carbon tape mounted on aluminium stubs, and the agency held on to them after returning the pouch. collectSPACE reported that Carlson sued again in January 2019, claiming the testing had damaged the bag, dragged down its market value and caused her real distress, and demanding the return of the lunar material itself. That dispute settled out of court, and the samples went to her.

Which is how, in April 2022, five aluminium stubs, each topped with a 10-millimetre disc of carbon tape, came up in a New York saleroom. Bonhams sold them for $504,375, well under a pre-sale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bidding opened at $220,000, seven bids came in, and the hammer fell at $400,000. Independent testing found four of the five stubs carried particles matching Armstrong’s first sample.

NASA still holds almost all of the 382 kilograms of rock, dust and core material brought home by the six Apollo landings. Its position on the rest hasn’t shifted in half a century: this material belongs to the public, not to private collectors. That stance holds up fine, right until two rows get merged on a spreadsheet.

Somewhere out there is a collector nobody can name, holding a cloth bag worth more than most houses, backed by a government receipt for $995 confirming the sale was done by the book.

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A sailor burst into a small wooden railway station in the north end of Halifax on the morning of 6 December 1917 and told everyone inside to run.

Vince Coleman, the dispatcher on duty, walked back to his telegraph key instead. As the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic recounts, he was thinking about the overnight passenger train from Saint John, roughly 300 people aboard, due in at 8:55am on a line that ran straight past a burning munitions ship. He tapped out a warning to hold the train, then signed off: “Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys.”

Minutes later the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, packed with explosives bound for the war in Europe, detonated in Halifax Harbour.

A city with 2,000 dead and no spare hospital beds

Almost every building within half a mile of the water came down, and records held by the Massachusetts State Library put the immediate toll at 1,800 killed, 3,000 seriously wounded and another 10,000 needing medical attention. Later counts settle at close to 2,000 dead.

Halifax was in no position to absorb that. It was a wartime port, and as the medical journal Proto has documented, local hospitals were already carrying soldiers sent home to recover. Doctors worked through the first night and kept going.

Then it started to snow.

Boston did not wait to be invited

News crossed the wires and landed on the desk of Massachusetts governor Samuel McCall around 11am. What he had was fragmentary at best, a few lines about some sort of catastrophe up the coast. Writing in its account of that day, the Massachusetts Historical Society notes that McCall wired back a promise that his state would go the limit, and called an emergency meeting of the Committee of Public Safety.

By 10pm, twelve hours after the blast, a relief train loaded with doctors, nurses and supplies pulled out of Boston. Nobody in Halifax had yet told them what was needed.

A blizzard caught the train en route, hardly a surprise for Maine and New Brunswick in December. It did not turn back. Staff wired ahead for extra supplies while they were still stuck in the drifts, and the Halifax Municipal Archives documents the first American medical train arriving on 8 December, having pushed through snow for most of the trip.

The help kept arriving for years

That first train turned out to be the opening instalment. Author John U. Bacon, speaking to WBUR about his book on the disaster, counted two trains, two ships, 100 doctors, 300 nurses and about a million dollars in supplies, enough to stand up several temporary hospitals.

The medical unit went home on 14 December and formed the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee on the journey back. The same archive shows it raised half a million dollars, refurnished more than 1,800 homes and set aside $25,000 for the care and education of people blinded by flying glass. Halifax named a block of temporary housing the Governor McCall Apartments, on a newly laid-out Massachusetts Avenue.

One tree in 1918, then a gap of fifty-odd years

Nova Scotia sent Boston a Christmas tree the following December as a thank you, and the tradition quietly lapsed.

It came back in 1971, and not purely out of sentiment. As reported by The Signal, the Lunenburg County Christmas Tree Producers Association revived the gift with one eye on the export market for Nova Scotian spruce. The provincial government took the job over a few years later and has handled it ever since, which is how a one-off act of gratitude became a line item.

What it takes to qualify as the tree

Anyone can nominate one. Criteria published by the Government of Nova Scotia ask for a white spruce, red spruce or balsam fir standing 12 to 15 metres, healthy, good colour, medium to heavy density, uniform and symmetrical, and easy to get a truck near. Officials narrow the field before checking their shortlist with Boston.

Boston’s 2025 tree was a 45-foot white spruce nominated by Ronald and Claire Feener of Lunenburg County. It reached the Common by flatbed truck under police escort, the City of Boston confirmed. Mayor Michelle Wu flew up for the cutting and, as CBC News reported, took a turn with the chainsaw herself on a 42-year-old spruce while a certified tree-felling instructor supervised.

That was a year of tariff threats and cross-border sniping, and the tree went south anyway.

Most international goodwill exists as paperwork nobody reads. This one gets scouted for months, felled in front of a crowd, driven hundreds of kilometres and switched on in a public park every December, all because a train once left Boston into a blizzard for a city that had barely had time to explain what was wrong.

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The women walked home at night and glowed.

Radium dust settled in their hair and on their coats, so a dial painter leaving the plant in Orange, New Jersey, trailed a faint shimmer down the footpath. Plenty of them thought this was marvellous. They painted their fingernails with it and dabbed it on their teeth before a dance. Nobody in management suggested they stop.

The paint was branded Undark, a mix of radium and zinc sulfide developed by Dr Sabin von Sochocky. In its account of the digitised company files, the National Archives describes how the Radium Luminous Material Corporation opened its Orange factory in 1917, selling the glow to watchmakers and instrument firms. Radium dials were prized in the trenches of the First World War and fashionable everywhere else.

How the paint got into their bones

Brushes were the whole problem.

Camel-hair bristles lose their point after a few strokes, and the numerals on a wristwatch face are minute. So the painters were taught to roll the brush between their lips before each dip. Lip, dip, paint, several hundred times a shift. The Science Museum Group notes that the New Jersey women worked on paper dials with a water-based paint, applied with fine camelhair brushes rather than the metal stylus used elsewhere in the industry. A trace of radium went down the throat with every dial.

Radium behaves chemically like calcium, so the body lodges it in bone and leaves it there, decaying quietly, for a life that just got much shorter.

The doctor who worked it out

Dentists noticed first. From about 1922 they were pulling aching teeth from young women in Orange, finding that pieces of jawbone came away too. A dentist, Theodor Blum, described the condition in 1924 and named it radium jaw.

Harrison Martland, the Newark pathologist who became Essex County’s first medical examiner, took it further. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1925, he measured radioactivity in the tissue of dead dial painters and in the exhaled breath of living ones. A retrospective in Brain credits that work with pioneering the measurement of radioactivity inside contaminated human tissue.

U.S. Radium hired its own experts to challenge his findings. Reasonable enough in 1925, when one man’s diagnosis was still just one man’s diagnosis, though the company kept denying any link to radium for another decade.

Five women, one settlement, no admission

Grace Fryer needed two years to find a lawyer who would take her case. Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice joined her, and by the first hearing in January 1928 none of the five could lift an arm to swear the oath.

They settled that June for $10,000 each, an annuity of $600 for life and their medical bills covered. The company admitted nothing, and most dial painters received no compensation at all, the National Archives notes. In 1936, a federal court in New Jersey ruled that U.S. Radium had not fraudulently hidden the danger, a decision that pushed surviving claims outside a two-year limitation period and effectively ended them.

What happened in Ottawa

Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Illinois, the Radium Dial Company assured its painters that the Orange trouble had nothing to do with them, since the radium over there was impure. The firm had been medically screening its own workers since 1925 and keeping the results to itself. As History.com documents, Illinois workers lost in court through the mid-1930s, after which the state passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, effective 1936, requiring employers to carry cover for industrial poisoning.

Catherine Donohue led fifteen women in a fresh suit in 1937. By a hearing the following February she weighed around 32 kilograms and had to be carried into the room, and, as Northern Public Radio reported, she arrived with a box of what she said were pieces of her own jawbone. Local papers took to calling the group the society of the living dead, NPR Illinois reports, and their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, took the case for free because his clients had nothing to pay him. Later hearings moved to Donohue’s home, where she testified from a couch because she could no longer travel.

The Illinois Industrial Commission ruled for Donohue in April 1938 and confirmed the award that July. She died on 27 July, three weeks later. Radium Dial fought on regardless. The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the company’s petition to overturn the award in June 1939, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined a further appeal that October, more than a year after Donohue’s death.

That refusal to intervene left the award standing, and with it the principle that an employer could be held liable for a disease that surfaced years, sometimes a decade or more, after the job ended. Grossman’s son, three decades a Department of Labor lawyer, traces a line from those hearings to the federal OSHA Act, which he dates to 1971.

The measurements they left behind

Many surviving painters later volunteered their bodies to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, whose review of the radium cases sets out how those measurements shaped radiation protection limits for the nuclear age.

Radium-226 has a half-life of roughly 1,600 years, so the women are still faintly radioactive in their graves and will be long after everyone reading this is gone. A surprising amount of modern workplace law rests on that fact. None of them were trying to found a legal doctrine. They wanted someone to pay the dentist.

The post American employers told young women painting luminous watch dials that radium was harmless and instructed them to shape the radioactive brushes with their lips — the lawsuits that followed helped establish that employers could be held financially responsible for harm caused by their work appeared first on Space Daily.

America’s first professionally managed forest finished its first year in the red, and the man running it called that a good result.

The shortfall was $392.40. It sits in a table near the back of Gifford Pinchot’s account of the first year’s work at Biltmore Forest, a slim pamphlet printed in Chicago in 1893 as an exhibit for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Pinchot opened by pointing out that the attempt was the first practical application of forest management in the United States.

What Vanderbilt bought

George Vanderbilt had been assembling land south of Asheville since the late 1880s for a house the size of a small village. The ground came cheap because it was wrecked. As the Special Collections Research Center at NC State University documents, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted advised that the soils and terrain would never support a grand park, and suggested growing timber instead.

Pinchot’s survey put the estate at 7,282 acres, a little over half of it woodland. The families who had farmed the land before Vanderbilt bought it cut anything sellable as fuel, fencing or saw-logs, grazed cattle through the young growth, and burned the woods off for pasture. Asheville had been heating itself on those hillsides for years.

Pinchot summed up the condition of much of it in three words: “deplorable in the extreme.”

A card catalogue for a forest

Pinchot arrived on 2 February 1892, aged 26, trained in Europe because there was nowhere in America to train. NCpedia records that Olmsted put his name forward, and that he and Vanderbilt agreed on three objectives: sell timber at a profit, produce a steady yield every year, and leave the forest healthier than it was.

Then he counted. Crews broke the woods into more than 600 sections of about 5.7 acres each, describing every one in shorthand on a postcard-sized card and filing the cards as a catalogue of the whole property. He grouped the forest into 92 numbered compartments bounded by ridges, streams and old wood roads, then set a rotation of 150 years, meaning the second crop would be ready for the axe a century and a half after the first came out. Nobody involved expected to see it.

What the first year’s books showed

Labourers earned between 90 cents and a dollar a day, mules 75 cents.

The forest sold cordwood to the estate brickworks, ties to the railroad and lumber to anyone who wanted it, at open market prices. Expenses ran to $9,911.76. Receipts and stock on hand came to $9,519.36. Pinchot kept his own salary out of the accounts and conceded that supervision costs for fewer than 4,000 acres were far too high, arguing the same effort would have covered ten times the area.

Two findings mattered more than the balance. Large old trees could be dropped out of dense young growth with very little damage to the crop underneath, and the additional cost of careful work over ordinary destructive logging was small enough to be beside the point. Both were arguments about money, the case Pinchot had to make in a country that still treated trained forestry as a European specialty.

The German who built a school

Pinchot left in 1895 and went on to become the first chief of the US Forest Service. His replacement came from Germany. Biltmore’s own history of the estate credits Carl Alwin Schenck with running and expanding the plan over the next 14 years, and founding the Biltmore Forest School in 1898, the country’s first forestry school, which trained more than 300 of America’s earliest professional foresters before closing in 1913.

How a private estate became public land

In 1894 Pinchot came across the Pink Beds, a valley of rhododendron and mountain laurel in Transylvania County, and told Vanderbilt to buy it. That purchase and others became Pisgah Forest, and the holdings eventually stretched to roughly 125,000 acres.

Vanderbilt died in March 1914. Per NCpedia’s history of Pisgah National Forest, his widow Edith offered the federal government 86,700 acres at $5 an acre, around $200,000 below the price the family had asked a year earlier, and completed the sale in 1915. Combined with other purchases made under the Weeks Act, that land became Pisgah National Forest on 17 October 1916, the first national forest created under the act, as the Forest History Society documents.

Congress went further in 1968, setting aside 6,540 acres around the Pink Beds as the Cradle of Forestry in America, a site built around the remains of Schenck’s school.

The slow part of the work was never the trees. Pinchot enlarged his crews carefully, because the men he hired had only ever cut wood one season at a time, and the idea of protecting a crop nobody present would live to harvest had to be taught one foreman at a time. It took. More than half a million acres of North Carolina now run on a principle that began as a line item somebody had to justify to a very rich man.

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