A combination of curiosity and kindness led a thrift store shopper to reunite a Boulder Creek woman with hundreds of pictures of herself and her family, some more than a decade old, that she had never seen before.
It started when the shopper purchased an old digital camera, a Fujifilm F460 at the Flipside Thrift Store in Santa Cruz. When the shopper got the camera home and charged the battery he discovered hundreds of photos still stored on the device’s memory card.
The photos, of birthdays, parades, and everyday happenings, probably had great value to the people pictured in them but who were they? And how could they be found?
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Fortunately, the mystery is just the kind of quest users of Reddit are more than happy to embark on. This time, however, not much sleuthing was necessary.
Within hours of posting some of the photos on the r/santacruz subreddit, Chelsea Kryst got a call.
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“My friend called me and her friend saw a photo of me on Reddit with my mom,” Kryst said.
Upon closer inspection of the photos, Kryst realized the camera in question once belonged to her grandmother, who had just passed away weeks before. The more than two hundred photos had clearly never been downloaded or printed because Kryst had never seen any of them.
“I think it was a really cool thing that he did because without him I never would have seen these pictures,” Kryst said. “I was definitely emotional and processing my grandma at the time and I thought it was a really nice sign from her that she was still there.”
