Yeah, when we moved, back in 2006, my dear spouse had me doing the same king of "Great purge". I had a sizeable collection of boxes, most of them ending in the dustbin. Contents were - mostly - saved in an aluminium box, and I managed to "hide" a few significant boxes for the "furor barbarorum". Except the creature now salivates on salvaging the precious place my things is taking . When I was a kid, we found an horse skeletton in the backyard. Badly broken. WW1 apparently... The bullets that had killed it were still there too. I kept the bullets, that's much easier to move around.

I hate throwing away stuff so a few years back my apartment could almost have appeared on one of those tv reality show about people who never throw away anything. Some things had to go and one of those were my PC game boxes. I also got rid of some game and software CD, disks and manuals and old computers. I miss having all those boxes around me but they've been replaced with movies.

I still have all my 8 bit computers and their software with boxes and everything.

Mine is completely self-inflicted. I can't remember why I did it; this place has the room - er, HAD the room until the business took over - for a couple bookcases to tuck the games away and the wife has never given me any grief about keeping them. Kicking myself in the butt in hindsight.

Hey! How about share the scans of those maps, manuals to be preserved in the memory of internet?
Replacement docs is a good place (if they don't have them already). Anyway, an extra copy never hurts ;)

All I've ever found in the back yard was a brick. :P

I found an 1901 dime once :)