A box of heirlooms that could easily have been destroyed after falling to a Victorian road has been saved by a good Samaritan, giving an unsuspecting family an emotional reunion with personal history.
Ocean Grove man Daniel MacManus was driving home after visiting his nephew Dylan on Sunday when he noticed a stream of cars in front of him swerving to avoid a box on the road.
He pulled over, put the box in his car, and continued driving home.
It was not until he opened the box a few days later that he realised he had rescued a treasure trove of precious family history.
Inside were obituary notices, handwritten letters dating back to the 1960s addressed to a Sheila Stirling, old purses and extravagant items of clothing.
"Someone has kept these for a long time," Mr MacManus told ABC Statewide Drive on Wednesday.
"There was a lot of stuff in there that would mean a lot to someone's family members and they deserve to have it back."
Having already posted on an Ocean Grove lost-and-found social media page, Mr MacManus spoke on radio to try and find the box's owner.
An ABC listener who heard Mr MacManus speaking on the radio used a family history site to track down and message a relative of Sheila Stirling, asking them to call into the radio station if the box was theirs.
Within two hours of the initial interview, Ian Stirling had called ABC Statewide Drive saying the items belonged to his family.
Mr Stirling said he was "flabbergasted" as he did not even know the box was missing.
An emotional handover
Mr Stirling and his sister Catherine met with Mr MacManus in Ocean Grove on Thursday night and looked through the precious items inside the box.
They suspected the box fell out of Catherine's husband's car while he was moving items from their home on the coast to storage.
Mr Stirling said he had never seen the letters inside the box before and found it emotional reading them together.
"The letters were condolence letters for my mum when my father died in 1967," he said.
"When my father died I was 16. My mother was a bit closed and she would have been pretty upset, so I understand why I would never have seen them."
Mr Stirling said the box had provided a new connection to his deceased parents.
"It is not the sort of thing you think of on an ongoing basis," he said.
"My dad would have been 110 now; my mother would have been over 100.
"You suddenly have this connectivity."
Mr Stirling, two of his siblings and their partners, are planning to meet to go through the items in the box together and share memories of their parents.
"We'll be there for two hours having a coffee, I reckon, wherever we go, sharing memories of this and that," he said.
He said he was very grateful to Mr MacManus.
"He could have just left it on the road like everybody else but he stopped and grabbed it and made an effort to find who the owners were," Mr Stirling said.
Mr MacManus said he would have done "anything" to find the owners of the box, and connecting with the Stirling family on his birthday was the "best present ever".
"The personal stuff written in some of those letters was absolutely beautiful and the family deserved someone to go to the extra mile to get it back to them," he said.
