Port Richmond Woman Determined To Reunite Lost Old Photographs With Family
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Port Richmond woman who can trace her roots to the neighborhood going back a century, made a discovery that she hopes will help other families trace their histories.
"My great grandparents came from Poland early in the 1900s, lived elsewhere and then purchased it in 1925," Rae Pagliarulo said of her home's origin story.
Her great-grandparents raised her grandmother in the home, and then her grandmother raised her father there. Eight years ago, her father left it to her after helping her renovate it.
"I can't imagine living anywhere else," she said.
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Holding almost a century of her family's memories inside, Pagliarulo continues to make discoveries about the house she inherited.
"I was rooting through the basement looking for some tool that perhaps my dad had left down there and I found this envelope," she said.
In the envelope were photos of newlyweds, babies, children and families.
"They're amazing," she said. "It's a snapshot of a different world."
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The photos are almost positively linked to her grandfather's photography business. He ran it out of the home's basement after he returned from serving in World War II.
"I can surmise that they were projects he was working on or perhaps they were restorations, colorizations or he had developed some of them," she said. "And for whatever reason, they never made it to their final destination."
After confirming the people in the photos were not family members, she posted the snapshots to the Facebook page Old Images of Philadelphia, where she got a lot of interest, but no luck.
"You look around my house, I have lots of photographs, new and old," she said. "Feeling connected to my ancestors is so important to me. I feel like understanding them really helped me know who I am."
She's determined to get the photographs in the rightful hands of families who will cherish them as pieces of their own history.
"If there's any chance that these could help somebody to know who they were more or even to fill in the blanks of their past, I would want for that to happen," she said.
If you recognize anyone in the photos, Pagliarulo asks that you reach out to her on Facebook via her original post.
