About a week ago, my husband and I happened to be watching the six o’clock news when a story came on about a storage facility finding a unique collection of items. A couple had purchased the business a few years before, and had recently been cleaning out a storage unit that belonged to the business. In it they found a collection of WWII era military medals, including a Purple Heart, that probably had been accidentally left behind by a past customer. They discovered the medals all belonged to a man named Anthony Grunder, but they had been unable to locate him, or his family in order to return the medals. Never one to pass up a challenge, I immediately went to work finding information. I knew it was going to be a bit tougher considering the fact that I don’t subscribe to services like ancestry.com, but that was okay. Sometimes the tougher, the better!
First I performed a basic Google search. Before long I came across information that showed Anthony Grunder passed away in 1991, and was buried in a military cemetery locally, Zachery Taylor Cemetery. Unfortunately obituaries weren’t available online that far back, so I had to continue to search. Eventually I came across another obituary for a woman with the same last name who passed away in 2008 in Louisville. She was close to the same age as Anthony, and was also buried in Zachary Taylor Cemetery. Since you can only be buried in that cemetery if you’re in the military or have a spouse in the military, I knew the odds were pretty good that she was his wife. I read through the obituary, and even though the husband’s name wasn’t listed, I noticed that she had a son named Anthony. From that point I felt I had enough information to push forward to locate one of the children.
I chose to search for their only daughter, since she had an unusual hyphenated name that would be easy to track. I got lucky enough to find her right away on Facebook, but knew if I sent her a message it would get sent to the spam folder instead of her inbox (since we aren’t FB friends). Fortunately she had fairly lax FB privacy settings, so I was able to see that she owned a dog rescue organization in Indiana. I liked her already!
Her dog rescue organization also had a Facebook page, and that page offered a phone number. So within an hour of when I first saw the news story, I was dialing the number of a total stranger. A woman picked up and I began to tell her the story of how I had come to call her. She confirmed Anthony Grunder was her father and she was SO excited to hear about the medals! Since her brother still lived in the area, she told me she would call him and that he could contact the storage facility.
At the end of the call, she asked my name, and I decided to just give her my first name. The truth of the matter is that any librarian could have taken the same series of steps (or maybe fewer if they had a paid service like Ancestry.com). Plus, the idea of being interviewed on the local news is not my cup of tea!
The next night, the news followed up with the son, who was able to be reunited with his father’s collection of WWII medals. The story didn’t mention his sister calling him with the information, but that was okay. It was satisfying enough to be able to use the skills I’ve acquired to help someone in such a meaningful way. Librarians, though we may appear to be an unobtrusive bunch, often have the opportunity to be superheroes!
Even though the daughter didn’t know my name, she did have my phone number on her caller I.D. She was nice enough to text message me the next day to thank me for my help. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice ending to an already happy story!
Here’s the original story:
Librarian Rebecca 
Brilliant!
What a wonderful (practical!) example of the way the web and social media fits into human manipulation of environment to get information!