Meet the ‘Photo Angel’ — how one woman’s dedication is reuniting families with lost family photos
When Kate Kelley first returned a family photo in 2021, something unexpected awoke inside her.
Reconnecting people with their families through photos, she thought, is what she was meant to do.
And she was prepared to do it her whole life.
“I just feel like this plan has been in the works since I was a kid I just didn’t know it, starting with my relatives who were into it and who planted those seeds in me so many years ago,” Kelley told the Deseret News. “It just kept evolving and evolving.”
She recovers the pictures from antique shops across the eastern United States and returns them to the closest surviving relatives. So far, Kelley has returned photos to thousands who live in 48 different states and several countries across the world.
Even though the people in the photos aren’t her relatives, she believes they’re valuable because they are someone else’s.
Kelley has touched many lives, including one woman she returned a picture to who dubbed her the “Photo Angel.”
Sowing the seeds
Kelley said that her maternal and paternal grandparents “sowed the seeds” of family history in her from a young age. Before she was a teenager, Kelley learned about family fan charts, which represent familial relationships in a tree form. They were sort of a family love language that laid the groundwork for the Photo Angel Project.
“I just feel like this plan has been in the works since I was a kid I just didn’t know it.” — Kate Kelley
During the school year, she teaches at a local school in her home state of Massachusetts, and the summer is when her passion project gets her full attention.
It all started with her own family photos.
Kelley’s maternal grandmother was particularly fond of labeling the backs of pictures with names, dates and places. By the time she had passed away, Kelley, now in her 40s, had a lot of work in front of her as she sorted through the pictures with her mother.
They unboxed, sorted and unboxed some more — placing each picture into piles labeled “family” or “unknown,” the latter including photos of people neither one of them recognized.
But Kelley already knew she couldn’t just throw them away, because even if these weren’t her relatives, they were someone else’s.
Her grandmother’s persistence with labeling photos gave Kelley a good place to start and it wasn’t too long before she her investigative skills won out and she found a potential relative.
Phil Kemp, from Tennessee, was awestruck when he received that message sent from Kelley all the way in Massachusetts on Ancestry.com.
The pictures that Kelley sent him were ones that Kemp had never seen before — one of his father’s first cousin in a U.S. Marine WWII uniform and the other his great-grandfather in his car decorated by his grandchildren’s chalk art.
“It was like going back in time,” he said in an interview with the Deseret News.
Kemp easily recognized his great-grandfather, whom he remembered would give him a silver dollar on each of his birthdays.
“When I turned 5 years old in October he gave me his last one, because he died in December,” he recalled. “I’ve got those silver dollars to remember him.”
“If other people (have) even a tenth of the feeling that I had when I got those photos, it’s well worth it.” — Phil Kemp
“I think she’s very dedicated, and I’m proud that she is,” he said of Kelley. “If other people (have) even a tenth of the feeling that I had when I got those photos, it’s well worth it.”
Not every photo Kelley has returned was so personal in the beginning. Most of the photos that Kelley returns are from antique shops, where she sorts through a lot of photos to find pictures labeled with a name or address to start from.
As word spreads about the project, more and more Kelley receives donations of photos to return to their families like she shares on social media.
A long-awaited album
Kelley’s biggest success story came after receiving a donation of a photo album full of family photos that she returned to Stuart Bratesman in Maine.
Bratesman had been a professional photographer for 20 years — freelancing for publications like The New York Times and Sports Illustrated — before switching careers to public policy. He had also become a 25-year expert in his own family history. So if anyone knew the value of a family picture, it was him.
People “become a lot more real when you can see what they look like,” he said. “It changes them from names to recognizable people.”
The album included 46 pictures of his ancestors that he’d never seen before.
Included was a photo of his relative that he had searched for photos of everywhere he could think of, but was only able to find one of the relative’s brother.
“I was surprised and amazed and pretty elated,” Bratesman told the Deseret News. “That was quite something.”
Spreading the word
Through all of these stories, Kelley said that she’s “grown as a person because of the project,” in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
As a teacher by trade, talking in front of kids is nothing, but speaking to a crowd of adults ... well, that used to be a big fear.
Now, she travels the country to present the project in front of large crowds for organizations like Daughters of the American Revolution. And, she quipped, her geography knowledge have grown, too.
The Photo Angel Project is growing every day as people join in by following along on Kelley’s Facebook, YouTube and other social media accounts, where she gives tips on how people can get involved and where everyone posts their own experiences returning family photos.
“Now that we’re in the digital age, it’s people are going to be drawn to the photos of the past even more so,” Kelley said. “So I mean, I don’t see this going away anytime soon.”
What’s next for the Photo Angel?
Kelley’s hope for the project is that it continues to spread to more people who can send lost pictures back to where they belong, not just to preserve the past but to bring a little more light into the world.
“It’s just been so wonderful to meet all of these strangers,” Kelley said. “There’s so much good and kindness in the world, and I always knew that. But, because I’m interacting with folks from all over the place — and they’re so appreciative and gracious — I really feel it now.”
“It’s a bright spot in a dark world.”
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Correction: A previous version incorrectly stated that Stuart Bratesman had contributed photos to National Geographic. Bratesman has contributed photos to major publications like The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, but not National Geographic.
