Stock wedding image.Photo:Getty
Getty
An Australian couple has been reunited with their missing wedding footage 57 years later thanks to one savvy Facebook user.
Aileen and Bill Turnbull, both 77, wed in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1967 at Mastrick Church, according toBBC Scotland.
Stock wedding image.Getty
Six months later, Aileen stumbled upon the image in a moment she called “absolutely amazing,” per BBC Scotland.
As Aileen explained to the outlet, she was scrolling through Facebook when the photo appeared. That’s when she turned to her longtime husband Bill, who was sitting with her at the time, and said “There’s our wedding photograph.”
“I messaged Terry and it just grew from there,” she said. “His uncle was the guy we’d borrowed the projector from to see the film after the wedding, he worked with my husband. We gave back the projector, and unbeknown to us that film was still in the projector. We’ve only found that out now.”
“We looked at it once, after that we couldn’t find it and didn’t know what happened to it,” she added. “It must have got mixed up with something and it’s only surfaced now. Then Terry decided to try and trace this couple.”
Aileen told BBC Scotland, she could “still recognize everybody” all these years later in the “surreal” footage.
According toCBS Chicago, which notes that the youngest members of their wedding party are now in their 60s, Aileen had to “keep pausing” the footage “to look at people.”
“To look back and see these people was just absolutely amazing — I still can’t believe it really,” she told BBC Scotland. “I was just saying to my neighbors, we’ve got our wedding album, and the majority of people in that have passed away. So seeing the film was just surreal. A few of them are still with us.”
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Cheyne, formerly of the Royal Navy, told the outlet that he gave his reels to his uncle to keep them safe, before recovering all the footage when his uncle — the former colleague of Bill — decided to move. When he first saw the footage, he had “nobody to ask” who was in it, as he was the oldest person in his family and “everyone had passed away,” he toldThe Press & Journal.Luckily, someone reposted his image in a Mastrick, Aberdeen Facebook group.
“I kept them in my loft for a long time. And then I decided I would transfer them onto DVD, because I didn’t have a projector,” he sad. “The first film that was on the DVD was a mysterious unknown film to me. It was clearly a wedding, in Mastrick Church. I watched it many times, I didn’t know anybody.”
The film finder told BBC Scotland that he hopes to one day meet up with the couple, calling the conclusion of the mystery wedding film ordeal “a very happy ending.”
“He’s put a lot of thought into trying to track us down, we’re very appreciative of that,” Bill toldThe Press & Journal.
source: people.com