[If you should choose to adopt this prompt to contribute stories of folks who have gone out of their way to lend genealogy-related assistance to others, I would greatly appreciate a mention to Filiopietism Prism whenever you do so. Thank you! And please do use the same photograph below to illustrate the prompt and to show it is adopted from this blog. ;-) ]
This feature has previously reported about strangers helping strangers recover such heirloom items as lost family bibles, rings, necklaces, and letters. One Samaritan Sunday post even featured a young college student who gave the gift of life at the expense of his own athletic dreams via a bone marrow transplant -- but what about giving the actual gift of the return of one's mother!?
Patricia Addis was 11 years old when her mother passed away. Her mother was cremated and her ashes were placed into an inscribed memorial urn that read . . .
Kersten Janell Watson
(mommy)
27 MAR 1962 - 27 DEC 1999
We Love You
For years, Patricia kept her mother's urn in her room and cherished it. Later she joined the Army and was eventually deployed to Iraq. During her service overseas someone apparently stole the urn and she had not seen it in at least five years.
Recently, an elderly man and Good Samaritan named Juan Sierra (who had no connection to Patricia Addis or her mother) was in a field in the West Side neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas when he found pieces of what looked like polished marble or granite. He collected the pieces and later cleaned them up and pieced them together. That was when he realized what he had found was a memorial cremation urn containing the remains of a woman named Kersten Janell Watson. He put the re-assembled pieces into an old suitcase and drove them to the studios of NBC affiliate station WOAI-TV (Channel 4) in San Antonio to contact one of the station's "Troubleshooter" investigative reporters in the hope they could help locate the family of the woman in the urn.
Delaine Mathieu, a reporter with WOAI, tells the rest of the story here.
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Photograph of the The Good Samaritan sculpture by Francois-Leon Sicard (1862 - 1934). The sculpture is located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France. The photograph is by Marie-Lan Nguyen and has been placed in the public domain by her. See, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Good_Samaritan_Sicard_Tuileries.jpg
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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