I would recommend you establish some legal ownership and copyright before you do anything with it. Do you have negatives/slides, or only prints?
You could possibly sell the original photos to a museum, but retain the right right to make new prints (if you have the negs/slides) or scan them before hand hand retain the right to sell, licence and publish them. I'm thinking there might be a market for them among historians, university libraries - maybe as stock for publishers and the likes of the BBC/NatGeo etc.