When Kristen Vallaire brought home a used Sony DVD player she’d bought at a Goodwill in Leland, North Carolina, she expected it to power on to a blank screen. Instead, when she hooked it up to her TV on May 12, it started playing a stranger’s wedding. Someone had left a DVD inside and forgotten about it.
Most people would have ejected it, shrugged, and moved on. Vallaire decided the couple in the video should have it back. The problem was that she had nothing to go on: no names, no date, just faces at a wedding she’d never attended. So she posted the footage to a local Facebook community group and asked whether anyone recognized the bride.
It worked almost immediately. As WWAY-TV reported, a woman named Ana O’Donnell saw the post and recognized her own wedding. The DVD player, it turned out, had belonged to her mother, who died last year at 96. O’Donnell said her mother had watched the wedding video over and over because it let her revisit family members and loved ones she’d lost over the years.
Somehow, after her death, the player had made its way onto a Goodwill shelf with the disc still inside.
O’Donnell hadn’t even realized it was gone. “I would have gone to get it soon, you know, at some point, and not known that I’d given it away or that my mother had had it,” she told WWAY-TV.
She’d assumed the video was safe somewhere, waiting for whenever she wanted it. It had come within one stranger’s decision of being lost for good.
Instead, she got it back. O’Donnell said the return does more than preserve her mother’s memory: It gives her something to hand down. She comes from a big Portuguese family, and she hopes to show the video to her children and grandchildren one day—a piece of family history that nearly disappeared onto a thrift-store shelf. Both women said the whole thing was a small demonstration of what social media can do when people use it to help each other, and of how far a stranger will sometimes go for someone they’ll never otherwise meet.
Vallaire could have watched 30 seconds of someone else’s wedding and hit eject. Because she didn’t, a woman gets to keep the last thing her mother loved to watch.
