For Christmas in 1892 Edith Smith presented her husband Arthur with a family photo album. At the time they were living happily in the vicarage at Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire, but by November 2021 this beautiful heirloom was languishing in a second-hand shop, its leather spine slowly decaying. As a genealogist, I knew how much that album would mean to its family, so I went on a mission to reunite it with its rightful owners. I became an ‘heirloom hunter’.
Heirloom hunters look for objects that they can reunite with living descendants. Searching second-hand shops, flea markets, online auctions and car-boot sales they find objects with ‘clues’, and through a combination of genealogy and detective work return them to their families. Postcards, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, Bibles and wedding albums are just some of the items that heirloom hunters have returned. Typically they do so without any financial reward.
“I don’t feel that it’s right to charge people,” says Kate Kelley, who is part of the orphan-photo movement in the USA as ‘The Photo Angel’. “It’s just the right thing to do.” Kate’s mission began after finding photographs in her grandparents’ collection that she felt should be reunited with their families. Describing her trip to an antiques shop she says, “I’ll never forget how I felt when I saw a box of old photographs tucked away, in a dusty box, in the corner. It was heartbreaking.”
“I’ll never forget how I felt when I saw a box of old photographs tucked away, in a dusty box, in the corner. It was heartbreaking.”
This is a common theme for heirloom hunters: they have an overwhelming feeling of sadness and a sense of injustice at seeing an object abandoned.
Charlotte Sibtain has been collecting vintage wedding photographs for almost a decade. “It’s somebody’s most special day,” she explains. “The wedding photos meant something to somebody at one point, and then they just got discarded. I think the thing that really drew me to them was the sadness that they’d been chucked out or lost.”
Charlotte’s passion runs so deep that although she is married, she admits that the walls of her home in London are adorned with other people’s wedding photos but none of her own. The collection she has amassed formed the basis of her Radio 4 series The Wedding Detectives. Together with Cole Moreton, she uncovered tales of pioneering film-makers, nightclub owners in the East End, wartime romances, infidelity and murder.
Charlotte says that often families have no idea how these items have been lost, and they are delighted to have them returned. Chelsey Brown, an heirloom hunter based in New York, agrees. “There is this myth that families throw these items away,” she says. “That is not true at all. Many of these items actually end up at the flea market because of family drama.”
Chelsey, who has 101,000 followers on Instagram and more than three million likes on TikTok, is bringing genealogy to a new generation. Although her father was a genealogist, she confesses that it was only when she became an interior decorator and began haunting flea markets that her own interest was ignited. Troubled by the letters, diaries and photos that she found, she was unable to leave them behind and set about reuniting them with their families. This hobby has become a passion that she says she will never give up.
“I’m not your traditional genealogist,” she says. “I’m coming into somebody’s life unexpectedly. There’s a lot of hesitation. Many people at first think that I’m a scam artist trying to get their money.” However, Chelsey does not accept any money for her work, not even to cover the cost of postage.
Despite the joy of being able to reunite families with their heirlooms, sometimes Chelsey uncovers sensitive material, raising ethical questions. Take, for example, the contents of a love letter. “I would not want anyone to send me an uber-graphic love letter from my own grandparents!” she says. There are any number of reasons why returning an heirloom might prove to be problematic, and sometimes Chelsey ends up deciding it is best to just let things lie.
Sometimes Chelsey uncovers sensitive material, raising ethical questions
“I return 99 per cent of my artefacts, but there are things I have chosen not to return.” She cites the example of a diary that revealed a man’s biological father when she knew that the son was dying: “I’m not going to return a diary to a dying man to tell him that his father is not who he thinks he is.”
Although she says that such instances are rare, diaries and letters, by their very nature, contain personal information that was never intended to be public. Once she has decided whether or not to return an item, Chelsey will brief the recipients as to their contents beforehand. Even with some of the more painful reading, such as a wartime diary for example, she finds that people are receptive as long as they are prepared.
Her research has sparked new debates about rights and belonging. She is currently working with families who are trying to reclaim small objects from museums, such as letters. In many instances Chelsey believes that these items were traded by dealers and auction houses, and illegally donated without any attempt at finding the rightful descendants.
Although heirloom hunting is not an entirely new phenomenon, it is a fast-growing trend. The huge numbers of digitised records now available on family history websites combined with the power of social media has made finding people easier and quicker than ever before. At the touch of a button we all have access to vast amounts of information. Chelsey reports that when researching one of her first artefacts, it took her only 13 minutes to find a potential descendant on MyHeritage. It was such a thrill for her that in those initial few weeks she returned dozens of items. Chelsey estimates that she has now reunited more than 200 items with their families.
Adam Simpson-York’s passion for medals and militaria peaked during the Covid-19 lockdown. He began purchasing items on eBay, and gifting them to the descendants of the decorated soldiers via Facebook. The context of the pandemic made these reunions all the more poignant. At a time when we were all unable to see our loved ones in person, Ipswich-based Adam was bringing people together.
Connecting people with history, whether it is their personal history or historical events, is another common theme for heirloom hunters. It is clearly something that is extremely important to Adam. “I’m making the families aware of the stories behind the medals. When I return the medals, it’s a big buzz,” he reveals.
Part of the beauty of heirloom hunting is that it doesn’t stop at the point of handing something over. One beneficiary of Adam’s generosity told him, “Finding this medal has had quite an impact on the family. My mother and her two younger sisters had not gotten together for 24 years, and it’s happening now because of that medal.”
Returning an heirloom often results in this kind of unexpected domino effect. As well as starting a conversation between family members who may have lost touch, your involvement can encourage people to research their heritage for themselves. It can connect people with the present, as well as with the past.
It should be noted that not all heirloom hunters are public about their activities. There are plenty of genealogists and historians who find themselves the custodian of an object that they feel compelled to return. There are more of these mini miracles happening than we might think, and there is always the hope for the heirloom hunter that one day it could be their turn, and someone will return an heirloom to them. Maureen Taylor, who is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and runs The Photo Detective Podcast, explains, “I think all of us who participate in this are hoping that someday someone will contact us with that missing family photo.”
There are very few times in our lives when we are given a genuine gift. However, heirloom hunters are motivated by the pure joy of giving, and the peace of mind that the act of restoration brings. Kate Kelley, The Photo Angel, sums it up perfectly: “Touching people’s lives and the joy and the exhilaration that I feel, it’s just such a wonderful feeling.”
