For Christmas in 1892 Edith Smith presented her husband Arthur with a family photo album. At the time they were living happily in the vicarage at Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire, but by November 2021 this beautiful heirloom was languishing in a second-hand shop, its leather spine slowly decaying. As a genealogist, I knew how much that album would mean to its family, so I went on a mission to reunite it with its rightful owners. I became an ‘heirloom hunter’.
Heirloom hunters look for objects that they can reunite with living descendants. Searching second-hand shops, flea markets, online auctions and car-boot sales they find objects with ‘clues’, and through a combination of genealogy and detective work return them to their families. Postcards, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, Bibles and wedding albums are just some of the items that heirloom hunters have returned. Typically they do so without any
