At what age did you purge the American girls

Never - and DD is 31. She just had the one doll (Felicity), some outfits and the bedroom furniture. It's all been packed away in the original boxes waiting for her to eventually have children. If that never happens, then she can deal with it then.

I still have my Liddle Kiddles (a 1966-ish doll), so I'm a bad person to ask too.

BTW I knew what you meant, but this is a strange title if you're skimming and see it along with the sad Missing Girls of India title. 

DD was mostly just braiding their hair when she was ready to put them away at 13-14.

Well dd is 19 and only has two, one of which she just got three years ago (because it has her name and they came out with a diabetes kit around the same time). She says she is keeping them forever.

However she only had a couple of outfits and accessories. And a horse I think? That is long gone.

I’ve been having the same thoughts. Our daughter is almost 16 and hasn’t touched them in a few years. She has 4-5 AG dolls and then 4-5 of the knock offs that she received as gifts. Plus all sorts of accessories, we built her a double bunk, etc.

I’m tempted to sell most of it. I’ll keep a little for when kids come over but we’re not sentimental people so I wouldn’t necessarily feel like I should keep them for grandchildren one day. But having said that I still hesitate to sell knowing how much of investment they were, it seems wrong to sell something that she either saved hard to get or received as a gift.

My DD is 14 and is done playing with them/buying them, but we are going to still keep them. She decluttered all of the off-brand items (a few things we have accessible so younger kids who come over can play with them), but the rest is carefully boxed and saved for "someday if she has kids - or nieces". My DD saved for each of her dolls, so they are important and a good investment, so we are happy to keep them.

DD is 38 - I never purged hers, just packed it up. When her daughter (my DGD) was 6, (now 8) she was interested in AG dolls, so she got one for her birthday, then got her mother's doll. So she has two. I'm glad we kept it!

Pretty much never. My dd is 19 (almost 20) and she still has all her AG dolls.

I’d pack them away. I still have my Chatty Cathy. I wish I still had my Barbies but decided to let them go to auction when my parents sold their house. I packed all my daughter’s Cabbage Patch dolls and she passed them down to her girls.

I packed them up around the time she moved out at age 18. She stopped playing with them long before then, but would dress them up and sort of place them in seasonal scenes on her bookshelf. At some point, the Nutcracker outfits just stayed on year round. LOL. I put them all back in their original dresses when I packed them up. Tried to pack all their clothing together as well (so each historical doll's belongings in one large ziplock). Haven't purged any but I do keep thinking about selling the furniture.

My kid was never much into any dolls at all. Her cousin had an AG doll that DH’s sister tried to give to our DD but she wasn’t having any of it! She flat out said, “I don’t want that thing and don’t put it in my room. Plastic dolls are creepy.”   LOL. 

My answer to the question though would be when the kid is ready to let them go, even if it’s never. Every so often when I get sick of all the clutter, I make DD go through her stuff and decide what she still loves and what needs to be somehow rehomed. Some of the nicer things we pass along to her younger cousins, some things we sell either at consignment or garage sales (she netted over a hundred dollars on the stuff she chose to let go of when we recently had a couple sales) and other things we donate. Since she has purchased some of her things herself and to make it easier for her to let go without getting too hung up on what it cost, I let my kid have all the money from the toys, books and similar things we can sell and she can then spend that money on new things she is currently more interested in. (I keep the money from selling off her clothes though, because we pay for all of those.)

There are certain things she doesn’t play with or want anymore but I keep them around because they’re nice to have on hand when younger kids come to visit.

My parents (now deceased) bought each girl an AG doll, some clothes....I'm saving them for my grandchildren.

You arrived at the perfect solution. I love that she found a doll that is her.