COLUMBUS, Ohio — An old camcorder purchased at a yard sale 20 years ago held on to a hidden treasure: family videos capturing precious moments in time.
But whose family was it?
Debbie Wise was determined to find out.
“I got it for like $5, huge deal, and didn’t think anything of it until we got home and I was recording one of the kids and went to rewind it and realized I was watching their videos,” Debbie said.
Most people would have just thrown those videotapes out. But, not Debbie. She’s very sentimental when it comes to family.
“My heart was breaking for them actually because I would hate to lose those videos,” she said. “We thought they were blank tapes in the bag, and they weren’t.”
Wise couldn’t remember which house the video camera came from. So, she just held on to them for 20 years. Recently, she had all her videos digitized including those of the mystery family.
Fortunately, a lot had changed in the past two decades.
For example, the invention of Facebook. Wise posted a few screenshots from the videos asking if anyone recognized the family.
Her post was shared 175 times. Surprisingly, someone did recognize them.
Dawn Fears and her husband no longer live in Columbus, but their daughter does. Fears says she learned about the videos after getting a call from her daughter.
“Destiny said some woman named Debbie Wise was looking for our family,” Fears said. “It was one of Destiny’s friends from high school that told her about the Facebook post.”
Fears says she’s so thankful Wise didn’t throw away those videos. She’s happy to have them back. Her mother, father and stepfather were in some of the videos and they have all since passed away.
“So, these are memories that we will cherish, and we can’t thank Debbie enough,” Fears said.
Wise is just happy she could reunite them with their family videos, even if it took 20 years to do it.
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