You can find all sorts of things in a thrift store. David Gutenmacher found inspiration.

That's what happened when he discovered a bunch of old items like photographs, 35 millimeter slides and film canisters.

“I knew that if those were my family memories, I wouldn’t just want them sitting there collecting dust. I would hope that either somebody would put them to good use or get them back to me somehow,” said Gutenmacher, who runs the Museum of Lost Memories TikTok account.

That was nearly four years ago. The Forest Hills resident has been buying old images ever since —and recently started posting them on TikTok.

“I try to just get as many pictures as possible where you can tell who’s in them. I mean I look for interesting things, family pictures, really anything that could be a lost memory, a lost family memory is something I want to find,” said Gutenmacher.

And his followers — more than 250,000 people — love the content. A 30 year old home movie of an African-safari vacation went viral in January.

One of his followers went to extreme lengths to track down the young man in the video — based off a single clue. His Wesleyan Swimming sweatshirt.

“Contacted each swimming department to get in touch with the coach of that time period to be able to identify who was in the video,” said Gutenmacher.

A week later, the mystery man was located in Maryland and a digitized copy of the forgotten film soon was in hands.

He made a TikTok video in response, re-enacting his vacation video, that too went viral, with more than 7 million views.

“It takes you back to an old time. And he hasn’t been able to see that in like 30 years or so. And so to be able to just be reunited with with a lost memory and seeing his family on vacation again is just so cool. And he was super thankful we got it back to him,” said Gutenmacher.

Gutenmacher says the home video was lost during a move. Jennifer Ray who works at Gotham Thrift Shop says its common.

“We get them from house clean outs, estate sales, from storage wars, anywhere you name it,” said Ray. “We leave that big box for people to go through and lots of people come in and they make things out of the photos, and now someone is trying to discover where the photos came from which is really cool.”

Gutenmacher hopes to continue sharing his finds and hopes to create an archive people can search through, in hopes of making these lost memories, found once again.