As Vicken Marganian was evacuating during the Eaton fire on Jan. 7, the trunk of his car popped open and decades of memories flew out.
In the rush to leave his home, he had grabbed photo albums, containing hundreds of pictures of family members — his parents, his wife’s parents, his engagement party. He’d thrown the photos in the trunk. But with a gust of wind, the trunk popped up and out went the photos, soaring into the air.
A photo recovered by Claire Schwartz.
(Courtesy of Vicken Marganian)
“It felt like I was at the Super Bowl and the photos were like confetti, but instead of coming down, they were flying up in the air,” he said. “I screamed, ‘Oh my God.’ I put my hands on my head. I felt like my past flashed right in front of me.”
Through the smoke and ash, Marganian scrambled to pick up as many as he could, but he had to give up as the flames approached.
He thought he had lost hundreds of photos forever.
Thankfully for Marganian, a fellow Altadena resident with training as an archivist and a heartfelt dedication to reuniting photos with their owners came to his rescue — and to the rescue of other fire victims.
Before the fire, Claire Schwartz loved to find old photos for sale at the Pasadena City College flea market and would try to return them to the people who snapped the pictures. Her hobby began years ago when she was looking at a photo for sale at the flea market and realized that a house depicted in the photo had an address on it and looked as though it was in Silver Lake.
Claire Schwartz searches the boundary of Altadena Golf Course for stray photos.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Schwartz pulls burned pages from a yearbook through a fence surrounding Altadena Golf Course.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“I looked up the address and was like, oh, certain photos are easy to trace,” she said. “If I find a photo with a clear shot of a house, I will grab it and try to figure out who was living at the house at the time. I try to find their living descendants.”
The hobby has had mixed results. Recently, Schwartz had a photo of a woman that she tried to return to the woman’s family, only to be told that the woman was horrible and that her daughter never wanted to see the photo again.
But after the Eaton fire, Schwartz realized her hobby as an amateur photo detective could be used to help people who lost photos in the disaster when hurricane-force winds picked them up and deposited them sometimes miles away.
She built a website and Instagram called “Eaton Fire Found Photos,” and quickly people began to reach out to her with photos they had found. Schwartz has tried to identify and locate the owners of the photos, but if she reaches a dead end, she posts the photos on the website and Instagram and hopes visitors to her sites can help.
She currently has about 25 photos she is trying to get back to their owners.
In one instance, she received a whole photo album. Although she identified the family she believes it belongs to, Schwartz is waiting to hear back from them.
Schwartz looks over burned pages from a yearbook she found in Altadena.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Her hobby involves not only investigative work but also archiving. Schwartz previously worked at the Corita Art Center in Los Feliz in the archives department and has experience cleaning and storing lithographs, which has translated well to her current work with photos that were damaged or burned in the fires and winds. She cleans the photos and stores them in archival envelopes in temperature-controlled storage until they are claimed. She says she is happy to hold on to the photos her whole life.
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Nila Sinnatamby’s husband was cleaning their backyard in Pasadena after the Eaton fire when he found a photo of a woman in a bathing suit.
When Schwartz went to pick up the photo from Sinnatamby, she knew exactly to whom it belonged: Vicken and Hourie Marganian.
The photo was of Hourie’s mother, someone Schwartz has seen in some of the 20 or so photos she has already returned to the couple.
“We’re blessed to have Claire do that,” Vicken Marganian said. “We have kindness in this world.”
It’s been more difficult to trace the owners of some other photos.
Photos that Clair Schwartz has recovered from the aftermath of the Eaton fire, which have been posted on social media to try to reunite these memories with victims of the fire.
(Courtesy of Claire Schwartz)
At Altadena Golf Course, Schwartz used a stick last week to pull photos through the fence. She had been tipped off that photos were blown onto the fairway and greens. Most of what she discovered were half-burned pages from books that had flown out of burning houses.
Schwartz found a photo that seemed to come from a yearbook. A bunch of fraternity brothers standing together. They seemed to belong to the Jewish fraternity of some university. One wore a shirt that said, “Wake me up in 2008.” There’s a distinctive-looking campus building on the other side of the yearbook page.
They are the clues that will help Schwartz in her search for the photo’s owner.
