The Town of Stellarton, N.S. is hoping to unlock the mystery of a set of long-lost keys.
It’s a mystery that begins in Silver Spring, Maryland, where a set of very old keys turned up in a garage sale.
The keys are on a metal key chain of some sort. The name of the owner, John A. MacKenzie, and Stellarton are engraved on a tag attached to the key ring.
Kathy Musaro found the keys in a box her son had of yard sale knick-knacks.
“So I picked them up after my son had moved out, he left a lot of junk in our garage and I cleaned up all the keys, but that particular set just stuck in my mind because of the key chain. I would like to return them to a relative, of the John MacKenzie,” says Musaro.
Friday morning, Musaro sent a picture of the keys to the town’s webmaster, Paul Corbin, who put it on the town’s page.
“Being Friday, it seemed like an interesting fun way to get some more traffic to our Facebook page and of course I shared it with my colleagues and with the local media,” says Corbin. “Within an hour, we had over a thousand views.”
There are many MacKenzies in the Town of Stellarton and even a John A. on the local cenotaph.
“The problem is, there's lots of MacKenzies, so a John MacKenzie is going to be a bit of a needle in a haystack for Pictou County,” says Corbin.
Lorna Scolponeti's is a MacKenzie genealogist, whose mother was a Mackenzie from Stellarton. She had an Uncle John who visited the eastern coast of the United States many times, and wonders if he could have been the owner of the mysterious keys.
“He went as a kid, he went picking potatoes and he came to our house in Massachusetts, he travelled extensively,” says Scolponeti.
If a family member can't be found Musaro says she'll consider sending the keys to the town hall or a local museum.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Dan MacIntosh
