Lost family photo album finds its way home
Va. Beach native finds book at flea market, returns it to owners
RICHMOND — As Andy Castellano browsed a Lynchburg flea market the Saturday after Thanksgiving, an old photo album caught his eye.
He thumbed through and noticed old black-andwhite pictures from Virginia Beach, where he had grown up, and other photos of people in military uniforms from around World War II, an era that always entices him when prowling through flea markets.
“I like to look for anything older, unique,” he said.
The man who was selling it had no connection to the album and was merely selling stuff he had acquired in bulk. He was asking very little for the album — Castellano said he paid $20 for it and a couple other items — so he took it home with no particular plans.
“I figured I’d just get it and look at it,” he said.
Castellano found the photos seemed to cover a span from 1939-47 and appeared to be a teenage girl’s album of her life and family. At the end of the album, he found the girl’s 1928 baptism certificate with her name — Anna Alfreda Brauer — as well as the name of her parents and the name of the church, St. John’s Evangelical Church, now St. John’s United Church of Christ at Stuart Circle.
He searched online for the father’s name, found his obituary and home address on Monument Avenue, which he also searched and determined it was the same house in pictures in the album.
He also searched the girl’s name and found her obituary. Anna Brauer Oxenham died in 2020 at 93.
With all of the information he had, Castellano didn’t think twice about trying to get in touch with the family, although, he said, you never know in cases like this whether the family even wants their lost artifacts back.
So, he called St. John’s and explained to the woman who answered what he had. She confirmed the Brauers were a prominent family in the history of the church and said she would contact a family member.
“Within 10 minutes, she was calling me,” Castellano said, the “she” being Beth Oxenham, the eldest of Anna’s five children. “She was excited.”
Yes, she was.
“I’m thrilled,” Oxenham said.
She said her mother, one of six Brauer children, started the album in the late 1930s when she was in high school. She kept it up through 1947, the year she graduated from Mary Washington College and married Thomas H. Oxenham Jr.
The album included many photos at their home on Monument Avenue, she said, as well from Virginia Beach when her mother visited family there.
After talking to her siblings, they believe the album has been missing for only about three years or so.
They theorize it got mixed up with household items that were sold when their mother was downsizing to move into assisted living in 2019. Somehow amid the packing, the photo album was lost.
Until Castellano found it. “I was flabbergasted that first of all he was interested enough to even look” through the album to find the clues that led back to the family, she said. The album appeared to have suffered water damage and “wasn’t in real terrific shape.”
“Then to have gone to all that trouble to find us,” she said. “It was so amazing that there are still people in this world who would take all that time and effort to find us.”
He wouldn’t even let her reimburse him for what he paid, she said.
“My family is from Italy and Poland, so I don’t have a lot of 1930s and 1940s pictures from my family,” said Castellano, a vice president and financial adviser for Truist Investment Services Group in Short Pump. “I was just thinking if somebody came across an album that was my family’s, I would appreciate having that.”
The photo album has turned out to be an unexpected Christmas gift for the family, and can now be enjoyed by not only Oxenham’s five children, but 14 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren and generations to come, which is really gratifying for Castellano to know.
The album itself?
“I’ll keep it,” Beth Oxenham said. “It came back to me, so it’s staying with me.”