Family to be reunited with lost memento after teacher shares her story
A sweet moment between a father and his then-4-year-old daughter was frozen on film more than a decade ago.
“It’s kind of a family thing to go out to the beach, and so we took that picture in a booth years and years ago,” Tom Meagher said.
The photo strip from the Meagher family vacation in 2007 became a lost memento.
In July 2019, local teacher Emma Smreker found the photo strip in a book in northwest Oklahoma City. She said she spent a year trying to identify the two faces in the picture.
That search recently came to an end.
“I had just gotten home and I saw that I had a message request on Instagram,” Smreker said. “Honestly, elated. I don’t think there is a strong enough word for how I feel.”
A year of searching produced no leads. That was until Smreker shared her story last week with sister station KOCO.
“We live in San Antonio [Texas] now, but I stream my TV so I still get KOCO News, and we tend to watch that at night,” Maria Meagher said.
From Santa Cruz, California, to Oklahoma City to San Antonio, Maria, Tom and Sofia Meagher reconnected to the place they called home for only a short time by a 13-year-old picture.
“Apparently, I used that as a bookmark and forgot that I put it in there and had just gotten rid of a ton of books,” Maria Meagher said. “And, luckily, Emma found it. It was just so sweet.”
“It was crazy. I could not believe that that picture was on the news,” Sofia Meagher said. “It was really cool seeing such an old picture of me and my dad, so that was really nice.”
“When I started in used books on Instagram, I thought it was going to become this … I thought it was just going to be a little hobby,” Smreker said.
That hobby also was an inspiration for members of the Meagher family, who said they’re taking a page out of Smreker's book.
“We were at my parents’ house in California just a few weeks ago, and my father had passed away about a year and a half ago. And this was before the story even aired,” Tom Meagher said.
“Yeah, it’s before the story even aired, and I love books and he has all these old books on his shelves,” Maria Meagher said, “and I was just randomly pulling books off and it had flowers and an old letter to Tom’s grandfather from like 1920.”
Emma Smreker told KOCO that she plans on getting the picture to the Meagher family within the week. The Meaghers said they are excited to get the little memory token back.