Alvarado woman reunites with mementos thought to be gone

A woman was recently reunited with her past in a way she never dreamed, and it was all thanks to Facebook.

Most people could understand the heartache of losing family memorabilia that cannot be replaced.

Sharon Briggs does, but now, she also knows what it's like to get all of that back again.

About a year ago, a woman named Chandra Mays acquired an old, orange suitcase in Granbury.

"I was told that it was being thrown away after a house was being cleaned out,” said Mays.

Inside was a treasure trove of photographic memories, an old Bible and a military flag.

Mays posted it on Facebook and eventually tracked down the woman in many of the pictures -– Briggs, from Alvarado. They met this week for the first time.

Briggs says after several house fires over the years, she assumed all of the items had been destroyed.

She suspects that her sisters, who she doesn't have contact with anymore, left it behind after moving her mother into a nursing home.

"Oh, I'm shocked,” said Briggs. “I don't know why my family even left this stuff in the home my mom lived in.”

"When I originally started going through the suitcase, it became more significant than just a batch of photographs, especially after I found the flag,” said Mays.

"I have no idea what the significance of the flag is,” said Briggs. “My father was in the military. His parents signed him up in the military when he was 14 years old. That is the flag my mom got when we buried him."

She says her favorite picture is one of her and her sister that’s about 54 or 55 years old.

After she shows all the pictures to her kids and grandkids, she says she'll be getting all of the photos scanned and put on a disk so that she doesn't lose them again.

"I’m glad that she has something to share with her family and her grandbabies,” said Mays. “I would want it returned to me.”