What a great story! Makes me think of my mom. When she cleaned out her parent's house, under her mother's bed she found shoeboxes full of bankbooks all tied up with bakery string. $200 here, $400 there, $300 in this bank, $250 in that bank, etc, etc, etc all untouched for decades. About an $85,000 haul IIRC. If it had been put in stocks it would have been millions, but she was a young woman during the Great Depression, and didn't trust stocks, or banks for that matter, which accounted for the scattering of the funds.
I told my mom well send me postcards from the Agean. No, she would set up educational savings accounts for the children she was being paid to take care of, who's father was a well-known news anchor, in the 70s this was. They didn't actually need it.
She was her mother's daughter.