Bridal portraits are returned to woman in S.A. after 40 years
A San Antonio woman was reunited with her bridal portraits — missing for more than 40 years — thanks to a woman who discovered them over 1,000 miles away at an estate sale in Virginia.
Retired nurse and author Sandra Poindexter bought the two portraits for $5 at an estate sale in Brookneal, Va., intending to use the frames.
After taking a closer look, she realized they might be of value to the woman in the photos. A piece of tape stuck to the back identified her as “Harriet Elizabeth Marshall (Galbraith).”
Poindexter posted the portraits on social media, hoping to find the woman’s family to return them. A fellow social media user, Donna Reichard, tracked down Galbraith herself.
Galbraith, who is 84 years old and lives in San Antonio, hadn’t seen the photos since the late 1970s, she told USA Today.
Her sister was storing the photos after their mother died, but when her sister moved into a retirement home and held an estate sale, the portraits were lost.
Galbraith posed for the portraits at Bachrach Studios back in 1959, when she was engaged, USA Today reported.
She wore a Christian Dior gown and was captured by the famous photography studio, which is behind one of the only photos of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg.
Galbraith saw the portraits for the first time in more than 40 years on Tuesday, when she received them in the mail from Poindexter.
She told USA Today that she’s fulfilling her longtime wish to pass the photos down to her granddaughters, something she thought she would never get to do.