Mr. Airis,
Please keep us updated on your story. I'm curious to see how it plays out. It's an unfortunate incident for everyone involved and I can see both sides of the story. I definitely understand that you want your stuff back and rightly so. At the same time, from the museum's standpoint, what do you do when the people at a museum you inherited didn't keep good records 20, 30, or 40+ years ago (even though you have a professional staff now who keep very good records), none of the staff is still around, and you have no idea what happened to the items? You can't retun something if you don't have it even if you want to and there's noone left to put the blame on since it wasn't the existing museum that entered into the loan. Knowing that, is there anything the museum could have done to work this out before going to court? The situation is just all too common (although maybe not to the extent of your case as far as value is concerned) and I think it's something we could all learn from.
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