FRANKFORT -- At age 95, snug in the Frankfort home in which she raised three daughters, Rena Fuller knows the surrounding area and people better than most.
But in the past couple of weeks, Fuller discovered something new about her community and family when she met for the first time fellow lifelong Benzie County resident Gary Gonyon Sr.
The meeting proved enlightening for Fuller and helped Gonyon, 61, finally solve a mystery of two antique photo albums he'd possessed for more than four decades.
"I carried these for quite awhile," Gonyon said of two embossed leather photo albums he remembers finding when he was about 14 years old.
He found the albums, both with gold-edged pages filled with black and white portraits of people he didn't recognize, in a box left at local dump, Gonyon said. He can't remember what else was in the box, but he decided to take the albums home.
"They fascinated me," he said.
Throughout his youth, he held onto the albums, despite his father at one point suggesting he try selling them. Gonyon just packed them up whenever he'd moved; the albums even survived a house fire.
"Sometime along the way I thought, 'I want to find who these belong to,' " said Gonyon, who acknowledges he's not Internet savvy and never tried searching for answers that way.
Gonyon finally made headway a couple of weeks ago after sharing the story of the found albums with friend John Repp, a retired Ford Motor Company engineer and genealogy buff. They were chatting one day when Gonyon mentioned his long-ago find.
"He said, 'I have something to show you,'" said Repp, of Frankfort.
After seeing the albums -- Repp estimates they date back to the late 1800s -- he was intrigued.
"I couldn't help but take up the challenge of finding out about these people," he said.
But Repp didn't have much to go on. The albums contained little information, save for a few names on the first pages. He also had a location, with "Brighton, Livingston County Michigan" written on a page. The photos themselves weren't labeled with any names or dates, though.
"I went immediately to the Web," Repp said.
After many hours over several days on a computer, Repp began to piece together a family tree. He tapped into resources such as the U.S. Census and the Social Security Death Index, among others.
One particularly late night of digging led him to the connection he sought: a man named Merrill Fuller, whose name was on the Social Security Death Index and who had been married to Rena Fuller. As far as Repp could tell, Rena Fuller was still alive, and she lived nearby.
"I thought, 'Could this really be her?'" Repp said. "I said, let me check the phone directory. And to my astonishment, she was there."
During the last week of October, after an initial phone call informing Fuller of their find, Repp and Gonyon met with her and her three daughters to hand over the albums and share what Repp had learned.
"This is all really her husband's family," Repp said.
Fuller and her daughters don't recognize anyone in the pictures.
"I never knew too much of Mother Fuller's family," Rena Fuller said. "I remember when they used to come (to town)."
Even so, they're grateful for the family treasure.
"We really appreciate this, all that you did," Fuller's daughter Blanche Blacklock, 71, said to Repp and Gonyon during their visit.
The family is excited to share the albums with their younger relatives. Fuller has 12 grandchildren, 19 great-grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren.
Repp, who provided the family with computer-generated family descendant charts during their meeting, is happy with his discoveries.
"It was my commitment to what Gary had started," he said. "I knew Gary had entrusted in me the history he had brought along for all these years. I didn't want to let them down."
"I didn't think it would come this far," said Gonyon, who lives only about a mile from Fuller. "I just wanted the family to have what belonged to them."
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