Lost and found, 2014 style: Facebook to the rescue

NEW CITY, N.Y. — Rob and Yelena Silverman returned home with their boys, Aaron and David, from a week's vacation in Maine just before school started. They had a lot of great memories, but they had lost their camera somewhere in their travels.

"The vacation as a whole was really tremendous, so while I was really upset about the loss of the camera, I wasn't too downhearted as we drove home," Rob Silverman said. "And I was holding out hope, although I thought it was pretty slim, that the camera might find me."

Yelena Silverman placed the blame for the camera's loss squarely on her husband.

"I am the science teacher," she said. "He is the space cadet."

Silverman knows better than to fight with his wife, who teaches at Briarcliff High School. (She just received a Fellows New Teacher Award from the Science Teachers Association of New York State.)

"I think 'space cadet' is fair, for the purposes of this story," he said. "It really is my fault. I'm the one who put it in the bad place, on top of the car, and drove away."

On Sept. 7, a black Labrador retriever named Maddy found the camera while walking her owner, Amy Stevens, down a favorite dirt road in Pembroke, Maine. The road leads to the coastal town's most popular attraction, Reversing Falls, a waterfall that falls south when the 25-foot tide goes out and flows north when the 25-foot tide comes in.

The Silvermans had been there three days earlier; the camera had survived a downpour.

Stevens, 21, who sits with patients awaiting care at a local hospital, took the digital camera home and looked at some of the photos. There was a year's worth of memories on the memory card, including a shot of Aaron and David getting on a Clarkstown school district bus. Stevens zoomed in and saw a New York license plate.

She went to Facebook and posted a few of the photos — of Rob Silverman with the boys, and the one of the boys getting on the bus — on a couple of local free, swap and sell pages.

Her post read: "FOUND: CAMERA Found on the dirt road heading to Reversing Falls in Pembroke, Maine. Looking through the pictures the school bus is from Clarkstown, New York, with all hopes this post will get around and someone will recognize the family in the pictures and can help me find the owner so I can get their camera back to them, looks like a lot of cherished family photos from vacations and I want them to have them back!"

Pretty soon, everyone was sharing it.

"It was bouncing from Florida to Connecticut and everywhere," Stevens said. Before long, she found the Clarkstown community page.

Within five minutes of posting it there, someone recognized the Silvermans, including a former colleague of Rob's.

"Paul Hannon was a former co-worker I hadn't spoken with in many years," Silverman said. "I was pleasantly surprised just to hear his voice and doubly surprised by the news he had for me. He was the first to get to me."

Yelena Silverman heard from several parents, people in the Clarkstown transportation office, the ladies in the main office at the kids' elementary school, all saying they thought someone in Maine had her camera. By 4 p.m. Monday, she had reached Stevens.

It didn't occur to Stevens not to try to unravel the mystery of the camera's owner.

"The way I look at it, if this happened to me I'd want someone to do the same," she said. "The pictures in it are something they would want back. They deserve to know there's at least one person who's honest and going all out to try and find them, even states away."

Yelena Silverman sent Stevens their address in an envelope, in which she enclosed reward money. The camera — and its loaded memory card — is expected in New City by Monday.

"It's an amazing display of the power of the Internet and social media," Rob Silverman said.

Adds his wife: "I guess it's good that we take so long to download our pictures. I was trying to think back to how many photographs and how many memories we had lost."

The Silvermans are already making vacation plans for next summer.

"I feel so lucky to have it be someone like (Amy) who found my camera," Rob Silverman said. "I hope to get back up there next year and meet her and her boyfriend, or for them to come down this way so I can thank her face to face. It's definitely one of the kindest things anyone's ever done for me."

"I told her we have to get together and take her out on the town," Yelena Silverman said. "It's kind of nice that somebody out there cares enough to go through all that trouble and find us. I guess that's why we love Maine so much."