Lost and Found
Jan 8th, 2009 by Brian
One of the days last week when we were relaxing on Poipu beach I stumbled across an SD memory card buried in the sand. I guessed that it had fallen out of someone’s camera bag while they were on the beach. When we got back to the condo that night, Matt (my brother) put the card in his digital camera so that we could see if there were any pictures on it. There were pictures on it, and lots of them!
Browsing the pictures on the little screen on Matt’s camera, we able to determine that the card belonged to a family and had about a year’s worth of pictures including a little girl’s birthday, a wedding, and the birth of a baby boy (luckily, there were no pictures of the actual birth). Once we realized what we had, I decided I was going to make it my mission to return the card to the family that had lost it. It would have been pretty easy had their name or address been embedded somewhere, but all we had to solve the mystery was about 200 pictures of them, their friends and their family.
When we got back to San Diego I loaded the card into my computer and started going through the photos in detail looking for any clues that would help. The first thing we noticed was that, in one of the pictures of the family’s newborn son we could make out the ID badge of one of the nurses from the hospital. A quick Google of the hospital name told us that the hospital was in Lincoln, Nebraska. It would have been nice if we’d discovered they were from some small town somewhere, but Lincoln still has a population of 250K. Didn’t quite narrow it down as much as I had hoped.
There were a number of photos of a young girl’s birthday and we assumed that the girl must be the daughter of the camera owner given that she was in so many of the pictures. One of the pictures of her birthday cake revealed that her name was Addie. In another picture we found Addie’s name on what to looked to be the scoreboard of a minor league ballpark. The text on the scoreboard was a birthday message for Addie and included her last name. Now we were getting somewhere.
We had the final piece of puzzle when eagled-eyed Anna spotted the father’s name embroidered on a Christmas stocking in the background of one of the pictures. With his first and last name as well as city and state in hand we consulted the almighty Google and were pleasantly suprised to find the family’s phone number and address come back as the first hit (you should Google yourself sometime to see what personal information there is out there).
I dialed their number and spent a few minutes talking to the wife of the man we had Googled. The card was indeed theirs and, much like ourselves, they had spent Christmas in Kauai. She was quite grateful to hear that someone had taken the time to track them down. Mission Accomplished!
So, make sure you leave a file on memory cards with your name/address or at least leave enough clues on there that someone will be able to track you down if you lose it.
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Wow! I think the CIA can use you. What a beautiful, caring thing to do.