Surprisingly, the fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton fires into deadly infernos in January spared many precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, kids’ art, postcards, yearbook pages and even old sheet music.

Claire Schwartz, an Altadena resident, has made it her mission to help reunite those keepsakes with their owners. On a recent morning, Schwartz stopped by a home in North Pasadena, where Nina Raj gingerly handed her a folded piece of paper. Schwartz carefully slipped it inside a plastic bag.

The treasure? A two-sided drawing that Raj found in her backyard after the fire. A crayon sketch of thick intersecting lines, a red and brown stick figure and a couple of abstract little squiggles in black. On one side, the word “Adonis” appeared. On the other: “Joseph.”

Raj is one of many Altadena and Pasadena residents who’ve contacted Schwartz about keepsakes they’ve found, after seeing Instagram posts on her Eaton Fire Found Photos page, launched just days after the fire.

“People … just message me and say ‘Hey, I found this,’ and we schedule a time for me to come by and pick it up,” Schwartz said.

Most of what Schwartz has rescued are precious family photos.

“I clean [them], put [them] in a nice safe glassine envelope, acid free, so nothing affects the integrity of the photograph, then I post it.”

After several days, Schwartz was able to locate Adonis, the artist, who turned out to be a kindergartener. The owner of Side Pie, a Grateful Dead-themed pizzeria destroyed in the fire, saw Schwartz’s social media post and remembered that his daughter went to school with a kid named Adonis. It was a match.

Schwartz was able to track down both Adonis and Joseph, the recipient of Adonis’s drawing. Great news, offset with some bad.

“Adonis, the artist, his family home burned (down). Joseph’s [family’s] home is still there. But they’re in the process of remediation, so everyone’s displaced,” Schwartz said.

The communication underscored the precarious living situations many Altadena residents now find themselves in.

“I’m in touch with both moms. They want to get together, they want the artwork back, but they’re so far away it’s just really hard to find a time to meet,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz and her partner live in South Altadena, not far from the Pasadena border. Their home survived, but many others on their block did not. Walk north for a few minutes, and you’ll find entire square blocks with only chimneys, piles of rubble and crews clearing burned-out lots. But somehow, through all this, scores of old snapshots and other fragile keepsakes, like the drawing found by Raj, did not burn. Schwartz’s social media posts, which seek the owners of lost photos, sometimes amplify other, more old-school ways of searching.

Like a flyer Matthew Weiss stapled to a telephone pole in the middle of the fire zone. It showed a series of five family photos found in a parking lot of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, which was also destroyed in the fires. The flier also included a brief message with a local phone number: “Found after Eaton Fire, looking for owner, please call.”

Weiss is a photojournalist from San Diego who grew up in Altadena. His parents were out of town when the Eaton Fire broke out, so he raced up north to check on their place. Once he secured the house, Weiss hiked up into the burn zone on foot with his cameras and photographed the smoldering ruins of his former grade school, Saint Mark’s Elementary. He helped some strangers douse spot fires on the campus and later returned to the site with his fiancée.

“We just started walking around the perimeter of the school, and she saw a photo [on the ground],” Weiss said.

“That’s brilliant,” he remembered telling her. “We should look for more stuff! Let’s see what we can find, maybe we can get them back to the owners.”

The couple found even more personal photos along with a collage of Saint Mark’s students, the church’s gas bill and scorched pages from Aesop’s Fables. With Schwartz’s help, they figured out that the photos belonged to a family who lost them in the mad scramble to evacuate. Schwartz then returned the old photographs to the family.

“With each photo I find, I just keep thinking about the person who it belongs to, and what they must be experiencing, what they must be feeling right now,” Schwartz said.

Houri Marganian and her family were among the first to witness the explosive ferocity of the Eaton Fire. They live in a secluded foothill neighborhood, only about a mile east of where the fire ignited. With the sun setting and the winds howling on Jan. 7, they raced out of their neighborhood believing they’d never see their home again. They hastily stuffed Marganian’s collection of thousands of family photos, neatly organized in about a dozen boxes, into the trunk of her husband’s car.

“He left the neighborhood, [then] the trunk popped open,” Marganian said.

The boxes tumbled out, and the ferocious winds did the rest, scattering decades of non-digitized photos in all directions.

“I was trying to collect them with my 12-year-old as the wind was blowing, suffocating us with the smoke, and we could see the embers coming down,” Marganian said. “Everything was happening so fast because of the wind.”

They gathered just a fraction of the photos before they had to keep moving. At first, Marganian considered posting something online about the lost pictures. But after seeing the full extent of the devastation in Altadena and receiving confirmation that her own home survived, the photos seemed less important.

Then, she began getting some very surprising text messages.

“Someone has your pictures up on their social media,“ Marganian said. “Random pictures like honeymoon pictures, pregnancy pictures, dating pictures.”

Through Schwartz, about a half dozen people have returned photos to the Marganian family so far. Some of the prints she got back, including images of her childhood in Lebanon, were damaged by smoke, soot and car tires. Even though she’s only gotten back about 200 of the thousands of photos she lost that night, Marganian is grateful.

“I met some great people through this whole experience, and I’m just glad our house is here,” Marganian said. “My heart goes out to the ones that weren’t as fortunate.”

“The photo really is the most tangible connection,” Schwartz said. “It’s the closest we can get to kind of going back in time and revisiting a precious moment in our life.”

Schwartz feels like she’s doing something productive for her neighbors, who may be feeling powerless or overwhelmed in the fire’s aftermath.

“It’s not putting a roof over anybody’s head, but it maybe is bringing back a little bit of normalcy or comfort to somebody who might really need it,” she said. “That’s been helpful, feeling like I can help somebody else right now.”