Mystery Of Glamorous, Globetrotting Family In Old Slides Solved

FAIRBURN, GA — As clues emerged in each frame, the mystery deepened. Who are these beautiful people and what is their story, a north Georgia woman wondered after she picked up a vintage projector from a Goodwill store in Fairburn that contains a cache of precious memories from family vacations and elegant parties.

Kristie Baeumert has an answer now after she posted the photos on Facebook and received a flurry of news coverage about the slides, which didn’t have dates or names. After she made an appeal on television, a relative of the glamorous, globetrotting family stepped forward.

Baeumert couldn’t be happier that her sleuthing paid off.

“I spoke with a very lovely woman who asked that the photographs be turned over privately with no media attention. I plan to respect her wishes," Baeumert wrote on Facebook.
"Many thanks to everyone who came together to find the family and for all of the kind comments," she wrote. "People shared stories with me of their childhoods in military housing and of lost pictures they wish someone could find from their own family."

The woman stepped forward after Baeumert talked about her detective work on CBS News.

The slides unearthed a treasure trove of precious family memories.

One shows a woman wearing a white strapless gown, red heels and gloves, a glittery choker, and a fur stole as she holds a champagne coupe, apparently filled with the luxury brand Veuve Cliquot. Others show shiny, mid-to-late 1950s vehicles — a DeSoto, a Pontiac, a Chevy muscle car. A photo of the Nagasaki Peace Park in Japan hints they were world travelers.

Baeumert quickly became enamored with them.

“I’m just falling in love with this sweet family,” the mother of five turned sleuth told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “I’m fascinated. I want to know more.”

Baeumert picked up the slide projector, an Argus 300 Model II, for $14.97 at a Goodwill store in Tyrone, Georgia. She wrote on Facebook that she hoped to be able to use the projector to view her grandmother’s slides, but then discovered the delicious mystery when she was paying for the projector. She clicked through them when she got home.

“The more I looked at them, the more I wanted to know their story,” Baeumert told CNN. “These pictures are part of their family’s story. They should have these memories to pass down and tell their story.”

Though she bought the projector in Georgia, the family may have lived elsewhere, Baeumert wrote on her Facebook page. The box the projector came in had “Kansas” written on it and she spotted a license plate from Colorado in one of the slides.

There are some other clues. “Wake Island,” known mainly because of its role in World War II, is scrawled on a slide showing a large plane, suggesting someone in the family may have been in the military. Wake Island, an unorganized U.S. territory in the South Pacific located about halfway between Honolulu and Guam, has no permanent residents, only members of the U.S. military and civilian contractors.

Given the age of the cars, Baeumert thinks the slides may have been taken around the time of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools. And though the family is African-American, some of the photos show the children smiling as they stand alongside white children or sit together atop one of the cars.

“I don’t even think schools were integrated yet,” Baumert told the Journal Constitution.

Whoever the family is, Baeumert said on Facebook she “would love to pass them back to their rightful place.”

“Because the internet is a magical place, I thought I would share them and see if they could possibly make their way back to someone in the family,” she wrote on the Facebook post, which has been shared nearly 3,000 times. “Perhaps someone will recognize them.”

Baeumert said on Facebook that she removed the original post showing some of the pictures out of respect for the family's privacy.

Photo: imageBROKER/Shutterstock