The Photo Angel Project

Join founder Kate Kelley at the Seekonk Library for a presentation on The Photo Angel Project, an inspiring and heartwarming endeavor to reunite long-lost photos with their relatives. Kate, a special education teacher of 25 years, first took up this mission when she found a pile of labeled photos of non-relatives that were mixed in with her grandparents’ old family pictures. Were they friends? Classmates? War buddies? Neighbors? Determined to find out, she started poking around genealogy websites and immediately began connecting with relatives of the photographed. Now she visits antique stores just to thumb through their pictures in her quest to find those that are labeled so that she can return them to their family members. One woman affectionately dubbed her “The Photo Angel.”

So far, Kate has returned images to all 50 states and several countries, and the project has been featured on NBC’s The Today Show, Family Tree Magazine, The Boston Globe, WCVB’s Channel 5 Boston’s “Chronicle,” “Who Do You Think You Are” magazine and several other news media outlets.

The purpose of this project is to inspire others to dig out their dusty attic boxes and visit antique stores for photos with identifying information to reunite with families.