Antique stores are great for discovering all sorts of items you might not know that you wanted. But what would you do if you found an item of personal value to you in your favorite shop?
That’s what happened to Jane Foster, a Grand Junction, Colorado woman. She saw her mother’s long-lost wedding photos in a store, and when she talked to the owner about it she recovered something even better.
When Jane Foster walked past an antique store, she saw something personal in the window.
On display were her mother’s wedding photos. Jane could not believe what she was seeing. These photos had been a central part of her childhood, and they had suddenly gone missing years ago.
Jane tells Inside Edition about her reaction by saying:
“All my life, we saw this wedding picture on the wall in our home. I stood there and I blinked and I blinked and I blinked, and that was my mother’s wedding picture.“
Jane and her family never meant to lose these important photographs.
The Foster family had put these photos, along with other belongings, in a storage facility. Unfortunately, the Foster family missed one payment on the storage locker in 2003, and all their possessions in the locker were put up for auction.
In the auction, someone bought these wedding photographs, and it was gone from the Foster family from that point onward.
Ever since 2003, Jane had been trying to find her mother’s wedding photos.
Losing these special photos of her mother on her wedding day must have been excruciating on Jane and her family. When they found out what happened, they tried everything they could to get them back. Jane estimates that she made at least 40 or 50 phone calls trying to track down these photos. But it was to no avail, until they happened to stumble upon them in the antique store.
When Jane went in to ask about the photos, the owner admitted he was the one who bought them.
To make this rediscovery even more emotional, the owner of the antique store had been the one who bought her mother’s photo at the auction. While Jane and the store owner were talking, he also revealed that he bought something else from the auction that day.
The shop owner went into the back of his store and came back with Jane’s mother’s wedding dress.
To make this encounter even better, the store owner also still had the wedding dress that Jane’s mother wears in those wedding photos. This wedding dress is from 1948, and is a true antique. For Jane and the Foster family, this dress holds a lot of emotional weight.
Now that Jane is reunited with these prized possessions, she says she feels much closer to her mother.
Jane’s mother died in 2013, ten years after the photographs and the wedding dress went missing. Mourning her mother without these items must have been hard on Jane, but now she has some items that connect her to her mother’s memory a bit.
For Jane, having the dress and the pictures around the house helps her a lot. She says:
“I can feel her, it’s really, it’s a wonderful feeling.”
It’s wonderful that Jane Foster was able to beat the odds and reunite with these special keepsakes.
This kind of thing happens more often than you may realize. Storage facilities often auction off important items and families lose some of their biggest treasures.
Fortunately, these days there is a website dedicated to helping people find items they lost in situations similar to Jane’s. People are able to post the personal belongings they get from auctions, and people can search for their keepsakes. Hopefully, this leads to more reunion stories like the Foster’s.
Watch the video below to hear more about Jane’s amazing story!
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