As you mentioned the Jenny Wade House, never let the facts get in the way of a good story; a recent forensic study (www.forensicmag.com 03/05/19) has shown that the preservational condition of this house is less accurate than believed-exterior doors have been relocated from one place to another including the door that the fatal shot has been claimed to have passed through. The fatal shot may have very well come through a window and Union soldiers had been in the house , so Ms. Wade (who very well may have been dressed in dark clothing) may have been mistaken for a Union soldier. Also, if all of the various materials that have been represented as coming from Gettysburg have actually come from Gettysburg then the battlefield must have been completely covered knee deep by these materials.
In fairness to Gettysburg's many "museums" over the past century-and-a-half, they grew like Topsy, erratically and often with little or no direction or any kind of plan. Most started off as collections made by locals of items gleaned from the battlefield, and these often grew by donations from others, sometimes relevant; sometimes not. What was probably the biggest was the Rosensteel collection displayed at the so-called National Museum, which despite the name, was until the NPS bought it in the 1980's totally private. I visited it twice before that, mainly to see their famous Electric Map, and saw regulation U.S. NAVAL officers' swords displayed that actually dated from the Spanish-American War or later. It was actually a collection of collections, a combination of several smaller local gleanings from across the area. The NPS went through the total collection afterwards and thinned it considerably, removing spurious items like those as well as the many duplicates of common items like Springfield rifles and Colt revolvers; this of course remains the foundation of the museum in the Visitor Center complex today, though again moved to its present location.
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