Found a box of old photos in a ditch near the old highway

I was walking my dog along the old Route 9 stretch last fall and saw a soggy cardboard box half in the ditch. Inside were maybe 200 photos, all from the 70s and 80s, just getting ruined by the damp. I took them home and spent a whole afternoon laying them out on towels to dry. Most were salvageable, just family vacations and birthday parties, but it felt wrong to just toss them. I ended up posting a few of the clearer ones online to see if anyone recognized the people, but no luck yet. What would you do with a find like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

olivias882mo ago

Man, I'd have to try and find the owners. My luck though, I'd probably end up keeping them for a decade, meaning to do something about it, and they'd just become my weird box of mystery relatives. I'd start pointing to people in the photos at family events like "remember uncle... ditch guy?" It's awesome you actually tried to dry them out and look for the family. That's way more follow-through than I usually have.

anthonygarcia2mo ago

Check the backs of the photos for names or dates. Sometimes people wrote on them. If that doesn't work, local Facebook groups are surprisingly good for this stuff.

robert2751mo ago

My grandma's photos had zero writing on the back, total dead end. I tried the local Facebook thing once and just got a bunch of guesses from people who didn't know.