2022 Week #3 Favorite Photo

I, like many genealogists, have hundreds of photos of our ancestors that are our favorites and it's challenging to find just 1 to focus on. A few years ago I shared a couple of photos of my relatives dressed in their Sunday best and a very dirty pig. You can read about that here!

This time I'm going to focus on a group of photos that actually aren't of my own blood relatives but have an amazing story of how social media and technology can work for good! 

Way back in August of 2020 late one night I get a message from one of my cousins on FB. She had a friend message her about someone selling a bag of old family photos on a Facebook Swap shop group. One of the names listed was my cousins maiden name and would have been my maternal grandmother's maiden name. Since my cousin knew I was into genealogy she messaged me with the names to see if I though they could be some of our people. There was another name on a photo that I knew was also another family name so I said yes do whatever you can to do to get those pictures!! I also messaged an aunt who lived in the town where the swap shop was from. So I had 2 people working on getting the pictures. My aunt ended up getting them and I went to her house a short time later to take a look at them.

In this stack of old photos dated the late 1800's very early 1900's we found a few of our family members but several that had names on them but not our direct relation. My 2x great grandmothers brother Bee, Caldwell Withrow, married a woman by the name of Lillie Riggle and these photos were of several Riggle people. 

I didn't quite know what to do with the ones that really weren't of our family. But, being a genealogist I couldn't throw them away. When my aunt and I were trying to figure out who some of these people were and how they could be related to us we used find a grave to piece some of it together. While on there I thought I should post some of these pictures there for those peoples descendants to find. I know I would be thrilled to find pictures of my relatives. So that's what I did. 

Fast forward 2 months to the end of November I get a message on find a grave regarding one of the photos I posted. Turns out one of the photos I posted was of this woman's 2x great grandfather (pictured below) and was a photo she hadn't seen before! So I emailed her immediately and told her the story of how I got the photos and emailed her copies of the ones I had. I then told her I would mail her the hard copies since they belonged to her family more than mine. 

The photos were of people from Iowa, found on FB swap shop in Missouri, and mailed to a very appreciative woman in California!! Quite a unique journey they had! It made me so happy to reconnect these photos with the right person and save them from the garbage.