Tracking down family of photo albums from the 1950’s are Pam Day and Billi Bournias. (Submitted Photo)
Two long forgotten 1950’s photo album/scrapbooks finally find their way back home to family members by the efforts of several good Samaritans: the Randy Robinson family, Pam Day, and Billie Bournias. Mr. Robinson’s son had purchased the albums several years ago at a garage sale. After some time, he gave them to his parents to see if they might know to whom they belonged. Mrs. Robinson then gave the albums to John Day thinking they might be related to the original owners, as many military memorabilia mentioned the names of John J. and Marguirite Day. John passed them on to his parents, Billy Jim and Pam Day, hoping they might know if a relative or not. No connection was found to their DAY family.
Pam Day contacted Billie Bournias, a well-known DAR genealogy researcher, to see if Billie could help track down someone in the family that might be interested in obtaining the albums. Billie instructed Pam to deliver them to the museum where others might be able to examine them. As a very ardent researcher, Billie was able to find names and clues after looking through the albums at the museum. “And the search was on! After numerous days on various genealogy and newspaper sites, I was able to establish dates and places, as well as deaths, marriages, children and grandchildren,” said Billie. She left messages through trees posted on Ancestry.com without any response. She then began tracing family members through Facebook. She knew she was on the right trail when she found corresponding names on the family tree and saw they were all Facebook friends.
Digging deeper, Billie was able to track down a grandson, Paul Barnett, and through several attempts was finally able to make personal connection with him. Spam and fraud keep many people suspicious of unknown contacts. Billie stated after she received his contact info, “I immediately called him and we had a wonderful visit. He gave me his mailing address and replied he would love to have his “Papaws Albums”; as he only had one thing of his grandfathers.” Mr. Barnett is the first born grandson of John Jay Day, Jr. who was born 18 Nov. 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama and died 19 Nov 1991 in Harris County, Texas. Mr. Day’s wife Marguirite Quarles was related to the Bell family of the Shanks community. This is how the albums landed in Freestone County. At one time some of the descendants lived in the Kirvin area.
The museum is very grateful to Pam Day and Billie Bournias for their diligence in seeing that these albums were returned to the proper family. There were too many military and family keepsakes inside to just be discarded or forgotten in the museum archives. The museum mailed the albums to Mr. Barnett on Friday May 13 and he should be receiving them this week. Billie said, “And what is it that Paul Harvey used to say- “And that’s the rest of the story.”
Written by Linda Mullen with the assistance of Billie Bournias.
