Most of the things turning up "by surprise" I notice, are in boxes that I thought something else completely was in. Or, incompletely labelled boxes, like 3/4 full of what I thought it had, and surprise, bonus extras.
I wish I had thought to take photos years ago though, even with the crappy cameras I had back then, it would certainly help to picture exactly the cards in question and what they were associated with. I have only been taking pics for my own reference for about 5 years and even now it's real handy when you think "Did that board have 2 or 3 memory slots" etc, one can look them up if you are super sure of model, but sometimes you get different revisions with different things populated, and are then like "Damn, I thought this board had 6 full length ISA" and they had populated one of them with only an 8 bit on yours.
After long experience, I've got the family/friends divided about 60:40 into those people who I can lend something to and they give it back, or build them a computer from spares for free and ask for it back when they have no use for it.... and the other group who you only let them get their hands on things you never want to see again, because I've lost 2 desktops, a laptop, a router, 3 monitors, that way over the years. One of them made the "no way in hell" special list, put them together a low spec internet and office machine because they said they were desperate, and by low spec, I mean low end of spec that was still in retail, so could have sold it for $300 at the time, anyway can't blame forgetting over time, because a literal month after I did this she gets a celeron machine off one of those predatory finance companies for a sticker of like $900 worth of debt (climbing at 20% APR or worse) which was the spec you could probably pick up for about 5 or 600, and it was basically only 20% faster than the one I built. So ask her to return the other one and she's like "It was complete and utter garbage, so I had to throw it out." *sigh* The best bit is, this was cap plague times, and the new thing was crashing inside 3 months, and I was all "Oh that's too bad" then she stopped paying on it and they repoed it, but she had barely made enough payments to make a dent in interest, so ended up snowballing and owing 2000 on it by the time she went for a credit settlement deal. Anyhow a bare month or so after that one is gone she's like "Can you build me a computer?" so I'm all "Haha, no!" ... well I guess there wasn't any super special hardware lost there, okay i815 board, but I'd probably still be using the case.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.