150-Year-Old Marriage Certificate Found at N.C. Thrift Shop Given to Couple's Great-Granddaughter

Hope Harbor Home Executive Director, Karmen Smith The marriage certificate

A nearly 150-year-old marriage certificate was found in a North Carolina thrift store last month — and thanks to "the power of community," it will now be reunited with the couple's great-granddaughter.

Hope Harbor Executive Director Karmen Smith tells PEOPLE that Assistant Manager Pam Phelps of Hope Chest Thrift Store in Bolivia was cleaning a picture frame on July 26 when she discovered something unusual in the back of the frame.

Beneath the photo, Smith says there was a hidden file folder with a marriage certificate of a New Jersey couple, dated April 11, 1875.

The document was so old that only the couple's first names, William and Katey, were legible, according to ABC/CBS/CW+- affiliate WWAY.

Phelps set the 146-year-old document aside and waited until the following day to bring it up to Smith. Once she did, the executive director says she was stunned.

"My brain immediately went into overdrive thinking of all the many reasons that this document would have been hidden," she recalls to PEOPLE. "Was it a forbidden love? Maybe a secret wedding to protect a child born too soon? I had to know the answers."

Hope Harbor Home Executive Director, Karmen Smith The marriage certificate of William DeWorth and Katey Havey

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Taking matters into her own hands, Smith started researching the document and later turned to Facebook for help in finding the family of the couple.

"In today's time, social media can be a powerful tool so I posted a plea for any help the world could offer," Smith explains.

In her Facebook post, Smith added: "This is a true treasure and was obviously, at one point in time, protected. As a society, we have lost the value of storytelling so it's safe to assume that the story of the stowaway marriage certificate got lost in the generations that followed it. But... HOW COOL would it be if we could find the family of this couple?!?!"

The internet quickly got to work, Smith's followers "guessing on the names and trying to piece together what they could offer."

"It was then that I got a message from Connie Knox, a local Genealogist with a YouTube channel focused on things such as this," she explains, noting that Knox spent a weekend of research looking through Ancestry.com posts.

Hope Harbor Home Executive Director, Karmen Smith The photograph that was in the frame, in front of the marriage certificate

In the meantime, hundreds of miles away, Irene Cornish of New York Mills, New York, decided to log into Ancestry.com on a whim.

"I haven't been on Ancestry in quite a few months," she told WWAY. "I actually went on to research a family member on the other side. And I happened to notice I had these messages."

As it turned out, Knox was able to determine that Cornish was the great-granddaughter of the New Jersey couple.

Upon the news, Smith says she was also shocked by the findings. "She expressed... that through the years, much of the family's possessions have been lost and the finding of this overwhelms her and brings joy to her heart," Smith recalls. "She insisted on coming to retrieve the item, as well as meet the people who started the wild goose chase."

According to WWAY, Cornish still is unsure of how her great-grandparents' love story began and why the frame ended up in North Carolina.

Hope Harbor Home Executive Director, Karmen Smith The picture frame in the thrift store

She told the outlet she only knows her great-grandmother, Katherine "Katey" Havey, moved to America around the end of the Irish Potato Famine and went on to work as a servant in a Bordentown, New Jersey hotel until earning her citizenship, while her great-grandfather — William DeWorth — built and rented carnival rides, acts, and equipment for a living.

WWAY also reported that William and Katherine had a child together two years before their marriage certificate was filed, citing research from Ancestry.com.

"My mother passed away five years ago," Cornish explained to WWAY. "I don't have any... immediate family in the area where I live. So I feel a little isolated at times. So it just felt comforting that, 'Oh these people are reaching out somehow.' I am connected."

Smith says Cornish expects to visit their thrift store — which is operated by Hope Harbor Home, Brunswick County's only domestic violence program and shelter — on Monday to retrieve the marriage certificate.

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"Family has always been important to me and the idea of giving someone something as special as this is an incredible feeling," she says.

As she counts down the days until that exciting moment, Smith hopes people will take two things away from this incredible tale.

"One: never underestimate the power of community. We live in a world of seemingly constant chaos but in the midst of all that, there's a family in this world that is just a tiny bit more whole because of a domestic violence thrift store, a Facebook post, and a community of people eager to find answers," she says. "Secondly, and not to be ignored, you just never know what you may find at a thrift store!"

Those interested in supporting Hope Harbor Home can make donations here or send financial contributions to P.O. Box 230, Supply, North Carolina, 28462.