Wedding Photos Returned To Rightful Owner After Washing Up On Staten Island
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- A mysterious black-and-white wedding photo album that was carried by floodwaters to a driveway on Staten Island has been reunited with its owners.
The album showed a wedding dating back decades. It turned up in the driveway of Dominick and Patricia Guinta following Superstorm Sandy in the fall of 2012.
Friends found the album, had the photos restored, and returned the album to the Guintas, thinking it was theirs.
"I started looking at them and I'm like - that's not my family, I'm like -- and that's not my husbands' either," Patricia Guinta said.
In the two years since, the owners of the album remained a mystery. The photos appeared to date back to the 1960s, but no one knew where they came from or who they depicted – until Tuesday morning.
One of the couple's daughters saw a report by CBS 2's Tony Aiello on the album, and contacted her mother – Patricia Kearns. The wedding photos showed Patricia and Paul Kearns' wedding in 1966.
"She said to me, 'Mom, you're not going to believe this.' She said, 'You're on the news.' She said, 'Your pictures are on the news,'" Patricia Kearns told CBS 2's Jessica Schneider.
"(The Guintas) went to great lengths to find us," added Paul Kearns. "So it's really -- they're wonderful people."
The Kearns' daughter, Erin, recognized two children in one photo – Derek Farrell, the son of Paul Kearns' sister, and Lauri Briody, the daughter of Patricia Kearns' cousin, the Staten Island Advance reported.
The last time Patricia and Paul Kearns saw the photos was in 1968. The photos were given to Paul Kearns' mother, who passed them along to his sister and then to his nephew – who had them in a box in his Staten Island home.
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