Woman Buys Snow Globe for $2 at Goodwill, Opens It To Find Stranger's Ashes Inside
Many people love thrift stores for the thrill of the hunt. It’s a wonderful feeling to find something quirky, valuable, or useful for a fraction of the cost you’d pay for it new. It feels like beating the system, in the best sort of way.
There’s a lot of heaviness to the items you can find in a Goodwill or Salvation Army, though. These items all used to belong to someone: they’ve seen things they’ll never be able to talk about.
That also means that sometimes, things end up on those beige industrial shelving units that really shouldn’t be there.
One woman was browsing through the various knick-knacks at her local Goodwill and found a snow globe that caught her eye. It had a scroll with a prayer on it and played “Amazing Grace.”
There was also a photo of a woman on it, but the lady thought she’d just take it out and put in a photo of her son. She bought it for $2, got home, started to fiddle with it, and found human ashes inside.
“After she found the ashes, she called asked me, ‘What should we do?'” said the woman’s daughter Jeni Kinney, according to KMOV. “I told her I would take a picture and put it on Facebook to see if we can find the family and get it back to them.”
So she took to Facebook with two blurry photos of the picture on the snow globe and posted a brief description of it.
“My mom bought this little fountain thing at goodwill in farmington this morning..was going to put my brothers picture in. Has a sweet prayer and sings amazing grace. Well she gets home and it has ashes in it. This beautiful ladys picture is in it as well… Please help find her family.”
It wasn’t long before people were sharing the post and some even suggested that Kinney contact a local media outlet to get her story out.
But then someone saw the post and recognized the lady in the photo. “Omg that’s momma Tammy!!!!!!!! Thats one of my good friends mom…” she commented.
“Seriously…. Omg thank you for not throwing it out. This momma was everything to her daughter I mean everything!!!”
“Never even crossed our minds of throwing her out,” Kinney responded. “We would hope if it was our family someone would try and reunite us as well♡♡♡”
It turned out that a friend had been holding on to the globe when it was stolen by a crazy ex who broke in and took a lot of belongings. He must have dropped them off at a Goodwill where the globe then sat, no one knowing its true value until Kinney’s mom stumbled across it.
Jasmin Ellis, the daughter of the woman whose ashes the snow globe contained, was relieved to get the precious keepsake back and doesn’t plan to let it get out of her sight.
“Thanks so much for finding my mother I lost my father at 3 and all I had left was my mother I stood by her side when she died of stage for cancer I finally had to say goodbye forever when I was 17 I’ve missed her so dearly I’m just so happy that u guys found her this means so much to me,” she commented on Kinney’s original post.
“I saw the picture and as soon as I saw it, I noticed it was my mom,” she said. “She’s going home. She’s going to be next to my daddy.”
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