A priceless family heirloom that was accidentally donated to Vashon nonprofit thrift store Granny’s Attic has been returned to its rightful owner, thanks to the work of a few islanders.

After an article about the bracelet was published in The Beachcomber, it only took online sleuths a few days to reach the owner.

Holly Beemer, who recently moved to Vashon and donated the bracelet by mistake, met Granny’s volunteer Vicki Clabaugh at Granny’s on Saturday, April 5 to retrieve the misplaced jewelry.

Beemer’s parents, Tom and Diane, are listed on the bracelet, as are various aunts and uncles and her paternal grandparents John and Mable — who she said she never got to know. The bracelet is all her father’s side, she said.

As Beemer traced over the bracelet, identifying family members and stories that morning, Clabaugh’s face lit up.

“It’s very exciting,” Clabaugh said. “I was just really delighted to say, Holly, you were the one. It meant a lot to me to have closure. I’ve been at Granny’s for over 20 years, and there’s so much good karma here.”

It was a special moment for Beemer, too.

“In my current life, I don’t have a lot of family I’m connected to anymore … and if I’m honest, have been going through some really brutal times,” she said. “Having this show up made me feel like my relatives do care about me, my family does care about me. Most of these people are gone, but this just felt like a message … that ‘we see you, and we care about you.’ “

The bracelet’s journey from and back to Beemer took several twists and turns.

Beemer, a seasonal farm steward for the Vashon Land Trust who moved to Vashon about six months ago, accidentally donated the bracelet to Granny’s recently while in the process of downsizing from her previous home in Seattle.

“I went through a big purge of family stuff, trying to digitize photographs … It was really tough. And this just accidentally ended up in the wrong pile,” she said.

In March, Granny’s volunteers discovered the bracelet, which bears more than a dozen charms celebrating births and weddings of loved ones. But it wasn’t clear exactly when it was donated, let alone by whom.

When another volunteer brought the bracelet to Clabaugh, she suspected that such an artifact was likely not donated on purpose. Clabaugh cleaned the bracelet, organized the names and dates on it and provided that information to The Beachcomber, which asked readers to help find its owner in the paper’s Thursday, March 27 edition.

Islanders started researching it, and two days later, Beemer was found. Among those sleuths contributing to the discovery, Clabaugh said, were Peter John Denning and John Cornelison, the latter of whom eventually found and contacted Holly Beemer on Saturday, March 29.

Cornelison, a software developer who has long been involved with disaster planning on the island (including being the founding president of VashonBePrepared), said he’s been collecting his own family stories since about 1990. He’s married to Kim Farrell, a beloved island physician and singer.

Cornelison used Legacy Family Tree, a free genealogy program, and data from the U.S. Census and the free familysearch.org database to search and map out the family.

He found a couple of results for the June 29, 1909 wedding of John and Mable, the oldest event on the bracelet, then narrowed the results down using the names of their children to a family tree in California.

“All that happened in an hour or so,” he said. “It was pretty quick.”

Trying to contact the living family was less quick, and initially all he could find were addresses and an ex-husband’s answering machine. Via social media searches for local Beemers, he found Holly Beemer, and upon contacting her and putting her in touch with Clabaugh, the rest fell into place.

“I was delighted,” he said, “just really happy that she wanted it. … I was just happy to enable a family story for someone else.”

When Beemer first found out, “It just made me laugh,” she said. “And I thought it was really sweet that somebody was caring.”

“Vashon is notoriously hard to break into, or, you know, connect with people,” she said. “And this feels like a good connection point, to realize that I am in a community that is aware of me, and cares about me.”