Couple Reunited With Wedding Album After 50-Plus Years

It's amazing how things fall into place sometimes...

This couple lost their wedding album 61 years ago. But with the help of a thoughtful stranger, they now have their cherished photos to look back on those cherished memories.

I thought this was a great story. It shows how a good heart from a stranger, and the act of simple kindness can affect others in a profound way. If only more people were like this, the world would be a great place to live.

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In June of 1952, the month Rose Scott and Patrick Roach were married, Harry Truman was president, Queen Elizabeth II had just inherited the monarchy, and photo albums were exclusively items you could hold in your hands.

When the Roaches lost their leather-bound wedding album, they thought they’d never see it again. But with the help of a thoughtful stranger and a local newspaper, they were reunited with their irreplaceable photos.

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"It's a miracle to have it back," Patrick Roach told BBC News. The couple can't recall when or how the book was misplaced, but a lot has happened in the 61 years since their wedding day at Hall Green Parish Church. It's possible the book was lost during one of their moves in the 1960s. The couple relocated to Ireland and South Africa for Patrick's work before settling in Staffordshire. Somewhere between the couple's raising their two children and becoming great-grandparents of four, their treasured wedding photos landed in a scrap basin in a Birmingham-area steel company. Years later, they ended up in the hands of Tina Bradley.

“I think my dad found it on a skip and thought it was a shame because it was somebody’s wedding album,” Bradley, a 56-year-old salesperson, told the Birmingham Mail, in a plea to find the album's rightful owners. “He must have brought it home to reunite it with its owners like I’m trying to do now.”

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Bradley discovered the photos while cleaning out her father's shed a month after he died at age 83. Bradley took it upon herself to bring closure to the photo mystery, in honor of her late father, a World War II veteran who, as Bradley put it, was “on the right side of everything.”

On June 28, 2013, exactly 61 years after the Roaches' wedding day, a few of their photos were published in the Mail, along with Bradley's appeal for information on the mystery couple.

Images of the couple cutting a three-tiered cake and standing with their wedding party outside of the church, were shown along with a hotline number for readers to call.

Tiger photobombs couple's wedding photo

A month later, after a daughter of one of Rose Scott's bridesmaids spotted the photos, the Roaches contacted the Mail to reclaim their album.

With gratitude and a bittersweet remembrance, couple revisited the images. "Looking through it and seeing all those people, so many of them have passed on, it brings a tear to your eye as well as remembering the happy occasion," Patrick, now 84, told BBC News.

"We can't thank the woman [who found it] enough," added Rose Scott. "We're so touched by the effort she made to track us down."

The Roaches today. (Photo courtesy of Birmingham Post)


(Courtesy of Birmingham Mail)