Couple's Wedding Album Returned After 17 Years. Reunited and it Feels so Good
After your wedding, you're really only left with two things from the big day: your spouse and your photos. If one of those goes missing, you've really got a problem. But it happens, and more often than we'd like to believe.
Gillian and Nigel Stewart thought they'd have the pictorial record of their 1986 wedding forever, but 8 years after their nuptials, it was stolen. On a weekend away, the couple, based in Ireland, discovered their van with all their luggage was missing. All Gillain really cared about was the album that happened to be packed in the van. The bride and groom hit the local press asking for help finding their missing photos but after 17 years passed, they'd long since figured it was a lost cause.
Then, last week, the Stewarts received a package on their doorstep.
"I was coming down the driveway and I saw a package sitting outside our gates," Gillian told the Belfast Newsletter . At first she thought it was just something her daughter had ordered over the internet. "But when I lifted the package I could see through the two plastic papers, our wedding...I was just speechless - I could not believe it."
Some anonymous benefactor had found the album and returned it to its rightful owner. Who and how is still a mystery. Gillian is now asking for the mystery donor to come forward, no questions asked. Well maybe a few.
It's a happy ending to the kind of symbolic loss that drives some people bat-crazy. Have you heard the recent lawsuit filed by a former groom named Todd Remis? He's suing his photographer for over $50,000 so that he can re-stage the 2003 wedding day shots his hired cameraman missed. Side note: Remis is actually now divorced.
He may have some bigger issues to work out, but he's not alone in pining for missing shots. In the days before digital camera (and those disposable ones on every table) wedding photos were bound by a set of negatives and the limited rolls of film a photographer brought. If anything was missed, or went missing, that was it.
Before you go thinking technology has solved that problem, consider Sara Wood and Jim Tierney, a couple who lost the digital evidence of their wedding this summer when their photographer misplaced the memory card.
Thankfully, a clever guy found card on the train station floor when he was heading into work and posted the photos on Facebook. Soon Sara and Jim were reuinited with their snapshots, and it only took a few weeks, not 17 years. That's progress for you.
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