A WINNERSH litter picker has helped reunite a family with their lost photographs, after more than a decade.
Tony Howells, who runs a social media community clear-up group, Adopt a Street, discovered a “soaked through” Blackberrry phone last month, as he collected rubbish from a gully on Old Wokingham Road.
After retrieving the micro SD card, he discovered more than 40 family photos stored on its memory.
“I posted to as many Facebook groups as I could, hoping to find out whose it was,” he said. “About a week passed, and someone got in touch — they used to teach the children in the pictures.”
From there, Mr Howells was able to find the owner, Tamarra Wright, who used to live in Jennetts Park, Bracknell with her husband Steve and two children.
“Tamarra asked me if I could post it back to them,” he said. “They lost it in 2010, and now live in Shanghai.”
Instead, they settled for email, due to the phone’s poor condition.
He added: “She told me the day it was lost, she had put the phone on top of the car and driven off, while taking her children to nursery and a childminder — she called it baby brain fog.
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this. I was at the garage by Sainsbury’s in Winnersh once, and a woman drove off with her baby in the car seat on the roof. I ran up and grabbed the baby, and she just burst into tears.”
Mr Howells said it was a “wonderful thing” to help reunite the Wright family with their photographs.
“More than 10 years on, their children look very different now,” he said. “They were so glad to have those pictures — at that time, you never would have backed a phone up like you do now.”
He suggested the family turn the entire debacle into a memory, by framing some photos with the broken phone.
It is now with Mrs Wright’s brother, who lives in Woosehill.
