There’s a Twitter thread where people are sharing the photos of their deceased loved ones that were captured by Google Maps and Google Street View cars.
In 2012, Randy Pristas saw a Google Street View car pass by as he was washing his car in his front yard and he waved at it. According to his daughter, he told her: “I waved at it, so you better check it one day.”
Randy died in 2017 and shortly after his death, his daughter Andrea Pristas looked up Google Street View to see if her father’s picture was still there.
The 21-year-old, from Turlock, California found him waving at the car. She told BuzzFeed News: “I cried the first time I saw it after he died.”
Currently, Andrea and a lot of others are posting photos of their loved ones from Google Street View on Twitter. The original tweet which started the thread has gone viral with over 500,000 likes on it.
“My grandpa passed away a few years ago,” @yajairalyb wrote on Tuesday.
“We didn’t get to say goodbye to him. Yesterday we found out google maps finally drove through his farm and as we were curious going through it, where the road ends, there is my grandpa, just sitting there. ?”
The tweet led people to look up the addresses of their parents and grandparents to find if Google had captured their pics.
Twenty-year-year-old Paula Sullivan, from Florida, was not hoping to get a picture of her dad who passed in 2016 but she found that a Google Maps camera had captured him just outside his front door.
“It was funny because I see there was a tree blocking the front door,” she told BuzzFeed News.
“So I see his leg, and I’m playing with it, and at that right angle I found him walking. It was an emotional moment for me. I really had no hope of finding him.”
“You haven’t seen that picture before, so it kind of just catches you off guard,” Sullivan added.
Twenty-four-year-old Lauren Schmucker told BuzzFeed News that she found the picture of her grandparents on Google Street View after her granny died in 2013.
The picture showed the couple gardening outside their residence in the city of Ardmore, Pennsylvania.
“It’s very surreal,” Schmucker told BuzzFeed News. “That exact moment that they just happened to both be out there in a garden is just a very real moment for me.”
“Gardening was something that they did together and something they bonded over,” she said. “That was a huge part of their marriage.”
Noticing the trending tweet about the pictures of deceased people online, Schmucker once again went to her grandparents’ address on Google Maps and they were still there.
“It’s definitely cool to see, especially after many years forgetting that that happened,” she said. “I went and looked at it. It made me smile.”
Andrea says that the picture of her dad waving at the Google Street View car is a good memory of her old man. She recalled how her dad drove the car onto the grass to save water as California was facing a drought in those days.
“It’s kind of like he’s still there, still waving, and it just makes me feel like he’s just still around,” she said.
“That was the thing that he would do a lot. He always liked to keep his cars clean. If I couldn’t find him and he was outside, he’d be washing his car.”
Andrea has taken a screenshot of the photo and says she’s up for another pleasant surprise in case Google updates her dad’s house with another photo.
“If you ever lost someone, give it a try,” she said. “You never know what you’re going to find.”
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