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118-Year-Old Marriage Certificate Found in Corona Library Book

Imagine opening a used book and finding a marriage certificate that’s more than a 100 years old.

Well a Corona woman made it her mission to return it to the rightful owners and NBC4’s cameras were there to capture that emotional reunion.

Amy Jasman found the old document inside a used book about the villages of Tuscany when she recently stopped by the Corona Public Library Bookstore.

It’s a marriage certificate from 1904 for Alexander Cameron and Catherine Finaly who got married in Spokane, WA after leaving their country of Scotland.

“It dawned on me that since I found the book at the Corona Library maybe a Corona resident donated the book,” Jasman said.

Jasman posted it on the “What’s Up” Corona Facebook page hoping the couple’s descendants might see it.

“I put it on there with great skepticism thinking there was no way I was going to be able to do this and I treid Googling their names and came up empty handed,” Jasman said.

Within an hour an ancestry sleuth saw the post and found the couple’s great-grandson Lee Donovan in Norco and called him.

“She gave me the names and I read them out loud and my husband confirmed that they were his great-grandparents,” said Susan Donovan, a Norco resident. “So I jumped on Facebook and found Amy’s page and I saw the post on her page and I sent Amy a direct message.”

They met up and Jasman handed over the priceless piece of history.

Tracy Herndon is seeing her great-grandparents marriage certificate for the first time ever.

“We really wish the document could talk because I bet it has a lot of good stories to tell,” Herndon said.

Herndon and Donovan say their mother used to donate books at the library but their mother told them she had never seen this certificate before or the book it was found in.

“How we’ve never seen it and how it ended up so local is still a mystery,” Herndon said.

It’s a mystery that may never be solved but it will always be a discovery of a lifetime.

“It’s amazing,” Donovan said.


Source: NBC Los Angeles

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