About a year ago, I was sitting around narcissistically Google-ing myself when I came across the photo above of “Robert C. Paetz + Mother”. It was dated 1923 and was being sold for $12 by a man named Paul in Northern California.

I quickly did the math and figured it was my 93-year-old grandfather and my great-grandmother, Matilda (who eventually lived until 102 when I was 16).
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Harry and Edna Grossmann’s stories ended in 1986 and 1983, respectively. A long-time married couple, they never had kids, and instead chose a life of travel and photography. But none of this was known to most of the world until 30 old boxes containing 1,100 slides of their travels made their way into Chicago-based photographer Jeff Phillips‘ hands. Read more…

We won’t deny it: we love a good lost and found story. When a camera goes drifting out to sea or is lost in an earthquake, only to turn up months or even years later with the photos still intact, we can’t help but smile and share the story.

In this case, kitesurfer Jens Knof lost his friend’s brand new GoPro Hero in February of 2011. When a spearfisherman found it two and a half months later just hanging out at the bottom of the reef, Knof was both relieved and amazed. Read more…

Photographer Nick Wesson experienced the power of the Internet first hand this past weekend after he managed to track down the subject of a photo he found in a thrift store camera — in a matter of hours.
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In 2007, Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took her camera — complete with underwater housing — on a trip to Hawaii. It was on that trip, during a nighttime scuba dive in Kaanapali, that Scallan lost her camera to the deep blue. Understandably, she didn’t expect she would ever see it again.

But as we’ve seen in the past, the rule is “never say never” when it comes to finding long-lost photographs. Six years later, the Canon Powershot washed up 6,200 miles away on the beaches of Taiwan where a China Airlines employee picked it up, and began searching for the owner. Read more…

In celebration of its 125th birthday, National Geographic has launched a new Tumblr focused entirely on sharing long-lost photos buried deep within its archives. The brain-child of Nat Geo’s photo archive curator William Bonner, “Found” already features 13 photos that may never have seen the light of day had it not been for this website — with many more to come. Read more…

Snapping mirror self-portraits may have gotten a huge boost from the introduction of digital photography and smartphoneography, but it is by no means a new activity limited to our era. The photograph above was created back in 1917 — nearly 100 years ago! It was snapped by an Australian flying ace named Thomas Baker when he was 20 years old.
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A crazy story of photo survival has emerged over in New Zealand. Apparently a couple had lost their camera during the Christchurch earthquake last February. They found the demolished camera yesterday, 18 months after it got buried in silt, and were overjoyed to find that their precious photos were still readable.
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Musician Lauren White recently came across a “gold mine” at a flea market in Saugus, California; she discovered 23 candid never-before-seen photographs of the Rolling Stones captured in 1965 while the band was enjoying a road trip.
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UC Berkeley’s library system is the fourth largest library in the United States, so it’s no wonder that treasures are often forgotten and buried inside the rare collections. Case in point: a massive collection of signed prints by Ansel Adams have been discovered in one of the 32 libraries, just sitting around in a box.
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