from Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak
I've written about them before, but if you haven't checked out these
websites, you may be missing out on one of your family's orphans!
Marge Rice, Photo-Rescuer Extraordinaire
In case you're not familiar with Marge, she
gathers orphan photos at flea markets, antiques stores, and so forth,
and returns them to family members. On 11 July (drum roll, please),
she reunited photo number 1,000 with its family of origin. So far, a
remarkable 744 strangers have been the recipients of her generosity.
Marge rescued her first photo on 9 September 2000, so that's an
average of more than fourteen photos per month. How's that for a
serious impact by a single individual? By the way, if you want to
keep an eye on Marge's progress over time, bookmark the Marge-O-Meter.
DeadFred, One of the Coolest Sites on the Internet
I've always been a fan of Joe Bott and the gang at DeadFred (www.deadfred.com), a terrific photobase site (that is, a
database of photos) where anyone can post or search for family photos
(now more than 60,000!). This family-based operation got into the
rescue sport a little later than Marge, but if you visit the site
right now, you'll see that it reports an impressive 924 rescues.
Here's a little known secret: that figure tends to lag slightly
behind the actual count. So I checked in the other day and learned
that rescue number 940 had just occurred! Not too shabby, eh?
A thousand thanks to both Marge and the DeadFred gang! Aren't we all
lucky that there are folks like them out there? If you feel the same
way, why not drop them a quick note? A little appreciation never
hurts! If you'd like to read more about them, here are links to some
of my previous articles:
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