The Eaton Fire wasted memories. The purpose of the photo detective is to bring back some

When Vicken Marganian evacuated in the Jan. 7 Eaton fire, his car’s trunk popped open and decades of memories flew out.

In a hurry to leave the house, he grabbed the album, which contained hundreds of photos of family members – his parents, his wife’s parents, his engagement party. He threw the photo into the trunk. However, there was a gust of wind, the trunk popped up, and the photo popped up and flew into the air.

“It feels like I’m in the Super Bowl, the photos are like confetti, but they don’t come down, they’re flying around in the air.” “I screamed, ‘Oh, my God.’ Put your hands on your head. I feel my past flashing in front of me.”

Through the smoke and ashes, Marganian scrambled to pick up as much as possible, but he had to follow the flames.

He thinks he has lost hundreds of photos forever.

Thankfully, Marganian is a fellow resident of Altadena, who has served as an archivist training and devoted himself to the photos of reunion with his master and rescued other fire victims.

Before the fire, Claire Schwartz loved finding old photos for sale at the University Flea Market in Pasadena and trying to return them to the person taking the photo. Her hobby started a few years ago when she was selling a photo for sale at a flea market and realized there was an address on the house depicted in the photo that looked like it was in Silver Lake.

Claire Schwartz searched the boundaries of the Altadena Golf Course for photos of wandering.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Schwartz pulls the burnt page out of the yearbook through the fence around the Altadena Golf Course.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“I looked up at the address and it was like, oh, some photos were easy to track,” she said. “If I found a photo with a clear picture of the house, I would grab it and try to figure out who lived there at that time. In the house. I tried to find their living people.”

Hobbies are mixed. Recently, Schwartz had a picture of a woman who tried to return to the woman’s family, but was told that the woman was horrible and that her daughter never wanted to see the picture again.

But after the Eaton fire, Schwartz realized that his hobby as an amateur photo detective could be used to help pick up people who lost photos from disasters in a hurricane storm, sometimes keeping them miles away.

She set up a website called “Eaton Fire Found Photos” and Instagram, and people soon started contacting her with the photos she found. Schwartz tries to identify and find the owner of the photo, but if she reaches a dead end, she will post the photo on the website and on Instagram and hopes visitors to her website can help.

She currently has about 25 photos trying to return to her master.

In one example, she received a complete album. Although she identified the family she thought she belonged to, Schwartz was waiting for their reply.

Schwartz looked at the pages she burned in the yearbook she discovered in Altadena.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Her hobbies involve not only investigation but also archives. Schwartz previously worked at the Corita Arts Center in Los Feliz in the Archives Department and has experience in cleaning and storing lithography, which has translated well into her current work where photos are damaged or burned in fires and winds. She cleans the photos and stores them in archive envelopes until she asks for temperature-controlled storage space. She said she was happy to keep pictures of her life.

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Nila Sinnatamby’s husband found a picture of a woman in a bathing suit cleaning their backyard in Pasadena after a fire in Eaton.

When Schwartz went to Sinnatamby to pick up the photo, she knew exactly who it belonged to: Vicken and Hourie Marganian.

The picture is about Hourie’s mother, and Schwartz sees someone in about 20 photos she has returned to the couple.

“We are lucky to have Claire do this,” said the Viken Mariani. “We have kindness in this world.”

Tracking the owners of some other photos is even more difficult.

Photos of Clair Schwartz recovering from the consequences of the Eaton Fire that have been posted on social media in an attempt to reunite these memories with the victims of the fire.

(Contributed by Claire Schwartz)

On the Altadena golf course, Schwartz took a photo on the fence with a stick last week. She was sent out and the photos were blown to the fairway and the green green. Most of what she found was half a page burning from books flying out of burning houses.

Schwartz found a photo that appeared to be from the yearbook. A group of brothers stood together. They seem to belong to the Jewish Brotherhood of some universities. One person was wearing a shirt that read: “Wake up in 2008.” There is a unique campus building on the other side of the yearbook page.

They are clues to help Schwartz search for photo owners.