Thursday’s column: Help reunite family with lost pictures
Jim Campbell of Bedford County holds one of many family photos he found on U.S. 29 while on a trip back from North Carolina. Campbell ran on to the highway to save the photographs and is now trying to track down the owner. | JEANNA DUERSCHERL | The Roanoke Times
Jim Campbell of Bedford County buys a lot of cars. Some he collects, others he resells. He’s in the business, at Bedford Motors, and that keeps him on the road a lot, traveling to various auctions in this region.
Today, Campbell’s trying to do a good deed, one that’s important to somebody. He found a box of photos lying in the road when he was driving back from a recent auto auction, and he wants to get them into the hands of the rightful owners.
They’re family pictures, several dozen of them. Some used to be framed. I say “used to be” because some of those frames were run over by cars and trucks before Campbell happened upon them. He can’t bear the thought that somewhere, there’s a family that has lost a piece of its history.
Campbell, 67, found them a couple of weeks ago. He believes it was on a Thursday, probably Aug. 23, but he’s not rock solid on the date. He was on his way back from an auto-buying expedition in North Carolina.
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
September 6, 2012 - 6:00 AM
Mr. Campbell is a wonderful man for taking the time and taking the risk to gather up those photos, and it’s very nice of you to help Mr. Campbell in his quest to find the owners of these lost photos, Dan.
I don’t know how much it might help, but does Mr. Campbell have a Facebook page where he could post the photos? I’m going share this article on my page. You never know…the owners or someone who knows them may see them if enough people pass the story around.
Dan, echoing the above comment from 13 suns, It would be helpful to track down more clues about who these people are. In particular I was thinking about the graduation photo. If we saw a graduation gown, we could probably glean what school it came from if it had a particular color.
Also, one of my biggest gripes with the online Roanoke Times is that you can’t click on the image and blow it up larger to look for contextual clues, or just see it in larger format, like you can with just about every other news website. This would ultimately be much more helpful in this guy’s cause.
scott, I doubt the gown would reveal clues. As to pictures online. There are some changes coming to Roanoke.com and the blogging systems early next year. I asked the exact question you did regarding clicking on pictures, to get a better view of them. Based on the answer, I think that’s gonna be a reality.
Thank god, that is one of my biggest pet peeves. Only once did they provide full-size photos that I can remember: back when the airplane crashed near Peters Creek Road a few years back. Someone bitched then and they added a larger version.
I could understand it back 10 years ago when Bandwidth was an issue, but that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Especially if you make it an optional bandwidth call by having to click on the photo. (Heck, some of the banner ads have more data than the rest of the page put together.)
I took screenshots of these provided photos and ran them through google image search, but didn’t get any hits. Maybe some of the others that weren’t posted might have better results. Particularly if any of the subjects in the photos have facebook accounts using these, it would be pretty easy to track down.