Old Donation Conundrums

[StephGaub]

I'm currently working on our donations from the 1940s. The records for these were not properly kept, so I'm assigning proper accession numbers and reconciling artifacts that were given different numbers, etc. Needless to say, it is a rather involved, but fun, project. I've come across a little issue... some of the items in the donations were either returned to the donor after the donation was recorded. Of course, there was no such thing as deaccessioning with these items I'm wondering what is the best course of action to deal with these. My first instinct is to formally deaccession them from the collection with the reason being that they were returned to the donor, etc. I'm just wondering how other people would handle this.

Thanks for any input and inspiration