Ohio Family Becomes Instant Millionaires Upon Finding 100-Year-Old Baseball Cards in Attic

The oft-repeated baby boomer story is that your mother threw away your baseball cards when you moved or she cleaned out your room. Years later, you found out, those cards would have been worth a lot of money.

This time, it's happened in reverse.

An Ohio man by the name of Karl Kissner was recently tidying up his grandfather's attic, according to ESPN, when he found a dusty box underneath a wooden dollhouse. Upon opening the box he may not have recognized the design of the cards, but he sure recognized the names — Cy Young, Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner, to name a few.

So, of course, he did what any reasonable person would do and put the box away and kept right on cleaning the attic.

It turns out that the collection is potentially worth millions of dollars, part of a rare set of cards issued around 1910, very few of which still exist. The ones that have gone up on the auction market typically feature well-worn edges and badly faded color, but the ones Kissner found were basically pristine, akin to "finding the Mona Lisa in the attic," he said.

The found set contains about 700 cards total and the best 37 are expected to fetch more than $500,000 when they're sold at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Baltimore next month. The complete collection could bring in as much as $3 million.

According to the family, the cards belonged to grandfather Carl Hench, who ran a meat market and likely received the cards from a candy distributor, who gave away the cards as a promotional item. Now, decades later, the family's upcoming payday ought to make for a nice legacy.

Photo via Twitter/T206 Honus Wagner