BOISE BENCH, Idaho — A stack of vintage photographs discovered at Antique World Mall on the Boise Bench is now making its way to California, reuniting a family with precious memories of their late grandmother they thought were lost forever.
WATCH: Photos found in a Boise antique shop find their way back to a California family
The photos were found by Chase Bennett, founder of Lost Memory Repository, an Instagram page dedicated to posting lost vintage photographs, home videos and audio recordings. Bennett, who grew up in Mountain Home, has turned his childhood passion for photography into a mission to restore vintage memories and return them to their rightful owners.
"I was the kid with the camera in Mountain Home, Idaho, running around the town making little dumb videos," Bennett said.
Bennett's inspiration for the project came during a trip to Tennessee when he purchased a vintage camera at a thrift store.
"I opened it up and I was like, ‘whoa, there's film’’ and I got it developed,” Bennett said. "And it came back with these photos from the 1960s of this family like on Christmas Day that had never been seen before and I was like, ‘how could I ever figure out who these people are?’"
The Lost Memory Repository Instagram page now showcases Bennett's work restoring vintage relics, digitizing them and using social media to help reunite families with their memories.
"I think my role is I can post it out there and then kind of just let it fall into place as it should," Bennett said.
Among the photos Bennett discovered was a stack featuring a woman with a distinctive appearance.
"I found just a little stack of photographs. It had a woman that just had a very distinct look, very interesting face, and so I posted a photo of her," Bennett said.
Another Instagram page called "Unknown Faces Collection" used Ancestry.com's face recognition technology to match the woman to Nampa High School yearbook photos. The woman was identified as Francis Togstad, who later married and became Francis DeCourcy.
With this new information, Bennett created a video montage of her photos. In California, Jenna DeCourcy and her husband Dalton were researching Francis when they discovered the video.
"We're talking about Francis and how she was like a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, that's why we were even researching her to begin with," Jenna DeCourcy said.
The couple couldn't believe what they were seeing, these were photos of Dalton's late grandmother.
"And seeing her and with the music and everything, like it really was like, oh my , it like kind of brought her back to life and, and it gave me a holistic view of who she was... I'm even more honored to be wearing her ring and carrying on her legacy as much as possible," Jenna DeCourcy said.
The family had little to no photos of Francis after she passed in 2016, with only a small box of items left behind. Bennett now plans to send the discovered photographs to the DeCourcy family.
"We're never letting these pictures go again for sure," Jenna DeCourcy said.
Bennett's next step for the project is to create a searchable database to make lost memories even easier to find.
This story was initially reported by a journalist and has been, in part, converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
