TikTok User Finds Antiques & Locates Families with Connections to the Items

This lady not only found a family photo album, but then located a cousin when tracking down the family. The following excerpt is from Insider.com:

Chelsey Brown says she has been going to thrift stores and flea markets for years to find unique antique items — and then return the heirlooms to the families they came from.

The New York City-based interior designer started documenting her finds on TikTok in July, and told Insider that at the time of writing she has returned more than 200 antique items to the families of ancestors who owned them.

Brown, 28, says she tracks down the descendants of the antiques she finds using Ancestry.com as well as her own knowledge of genealogy; she said she learned about the subject from her father and hopes to get formal training in genealogy studies soon.

“Since my dad is a genealogist, aside from decorating, family history and ancestry have always been important to me,” Brown said. “Now I try and thrift at least three items per week that I can trace back to a family member.”

One of Brown’s recent antique discoveries led her to a distant family member of her own, she said.

Brown said she discovered that she was distantly related to someone whose family photo album she found at Chelsea Market in New York City.

After hours of searching, Brown said she found the name of someone in the family album: William Fenning.

Only his first name was in the album, Brown said. To find his last name, Brown said she searched for first names in the book in every early 1900s census until she found a William as a head of house along with other names mentioned in the album. Fenning’s family was mentioned in a census report from the 1930s, she said.

Read the full article.