Long-lost wedding video returned to couple 57 years later

A couple living in Australia were reunited with a long-lost video of their wedding in Scotland after 57 years thanks to a Facebook post.

Terry Cheyne of Aberdeen, Scotland, said he had amassed a large collection of Super 8 films over the years, most of which he shot himself, but when he decided to have his collection transferred to DVD in April of this year he discovered the reels included a wedding between two people he didn’t recognize.

He posted a still image from the film to a local Facebook group, but six months went by without any leads on the identity of the couple.

The photo was recently shared to a group for natives of Aberdeen’s Mastrick area and it came to the attention of Aileen Turnbull.

Turnbull, 77, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, said she had only been a member of the Facebook group for five minutes when she spotted her own wedding photo.

“I was looking through Facebook, and up came this wedding photograph. My husband was sitting here, I turned to him and I said ‘There’s our wedding photograph,'” she told BBC Scotland.

Turnbull and her husband, Bill, 77, married in 1967 at Mastrick Church in Aberdeen before later moving to Brisbane.

The couple said they had only watched their wedding video once before discovering they accidentally left it in a borrowed projector they had returned to the owner.

“I messaged Terry and it just grew from there. His uncle was the guy we’d borrowed the projector from to see the film after the wedding, he worked with my husband,” Turnbull said.

Cheyne sent the Turnbulls a digitized copy of the wedding video.

“It just seems strange for me to see my mother and my father, not just in a photograph but there actually moving and walking,” Aileen Turnbull said. “And my husband, he saw his grandmother and his grandfather, who was 100 when he died.”

She said seeing the video after 57 years “was just absolutely amazing — I still can’t believe it really.”