SAN ANTONIO – Sandra Poindexter was looking for frames at an estate sale outside of Lynchburg, Virginia, and bought them for $5. But when she got home, she realized a bride was in the photos.
“I said, ‘I can’t take these apart,’” Poindexter said. “They are too pretty. Somebody might want these. They are bridal pictures and mean a lot to somebody.”
She posted them to social media, hoping to find a family member, and thanks to the detective work of another woman, they found much more.
“One of the users started digging and looking up who this was, and she actually found Harriett. She found the bride,” Poindexter said.
The bride is 85-year-old Harriet Galbraith, who lives in San Antonio.
She was 21 years old when she took her bridal portraits.
She and her husband married in 1959 in Washington, D.C., after he graduated from Georgetown University.
Galbraith said he was in the army, which moved them around quite a bit after they were married. They were married for 56 years.
“It just thrills me to death,” Galbraith said. “I can’t imagine all those years that I didn’t have them, and I would’ve liked them, and I know my husband would’ve loved to have them.”
Galbraith said the portraits were at her mother’s house in Virginia. The photos had stayed at her mother’s house because she and her husband lived all over the world while he was in the military. When her mother died in 1978, her sister took on all of the belongings and the photos.
“I had gone to visit her and asked her for the pictures back, and she said she wasn’t sure where they were,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith explained that they checked the attic and went through several boxes but couldn’t find them, so they figured they were lost.
When her sister’s husband died, they were unknowingly sold at an estate sale. Poindexter found them at another estate sale. Fate brought them back to Galbraith, a model in the 1950s who wore one of her favorite gowns for her wedding portraits.
“This is one, and that’s a Christian Dior gown that I had gotten from an ex-boyfriend’s mother, who gave it to me,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith said she is grateful for the women who did the legwork to get the portraits back to her.
“I’m just so happy, and I’m going to be friends for the rest of my life with both of these ladies,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith now has granddaughters and said she will give them the portraits.