When Andrew Bedford discovered an old wedding album dumped outside his city centre cafe in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, he considered chucking it into a nearby wheelie bin.

But when he opened the album, the vintage photographs of the happy couple on their wedding day in 1957 seemed too precious to throw away.

Unable to work out the identity of the bride and groom – their handwritten names had become too faded to read – he rescued the album and brought it back to his cafe, Eva’s Kitchen, for safekeeping.

His partner, Éva Lemperger, put out a plea on social media to help identify the couple.

Now the mystery has been solved after a local family historian took up the case and tracked down the couple’s 65-year-old son, Michael Dawson.

He revealed the album had been stolen from a storage unit near the cafe, along with other cherished family heirlooms, after his parents died.

It contains some of his only surviving photographs of his mother and father, Maxwell Dawson and Barbara Parr, and he now plans to “protect it with [his] life”.

Bedford said: “I was just so happy he got it back. I thought, if it had been mine, and I’d lost pictures of my family – and they were only pictures I had of them – I’d have been elated if somebody had found them and given them back to me.”

When the case of the mysterious wedding album was picked up by his local newspaper, the Wakefield Express, it caught the attention of a local historian and amateur sleuth, Anne-Marie Fawcett. “I run a local history group on Facebook with over 15,000 members, and I’m really interested in local history, particularly family history,” she said.

“I love researching. I love uncovering stories and finding connections. And I like getting to the bottom of mysteries … When I saw that nobody knew who the album belonged to, I thought, that’s something to get my teeth into.”

A clue in the birth certificate of another guest helped her to identify the church the couple were married in: Wadsley Parish Church in Sheffield. She then used a photo enhancing tool to decipher the name of the bride. “But there was more than one Barbara Parr in the records, so I had to follow them all.”

When she came across an electoral roll entry suggesting Parr’s husband, Maxwell, had lived near Wakefield, she guessed she had found the right couple and appealed for information about the family on social media.

An old school friend of Michael Dawson’s remembered him and helped Fawcett to find a photograph of him, enabling her to track him down on Facebook.

“I sent him a message, and he rang me,” said Fawcett. “He was absolutely made up.”

Dawson told her the album had been stolen from the storage unit where he and his brother had stored the cherished contents of his parents’ home after they died. “Someone had broken in and taken all the family treasure. He said he’d lost everything. So you can imagine how I felt to be able to reunite him with this [album] … I’ve got goose pimples talking about it. Everybody loves a happy ending, don’t they?”

Dawson told the BBC: “I’m absolutely elated because I am sentimental and it’s important for me to have these photos.

“I will protect it with my life now, based on the fact that it’s all I’ve got.”

Asked how he felt about Fawcett’s detective efforts, he joked: “I think she probably knows more about me than I do, which is a worry.”

But he added: “I thought I’d lost everything. I can’t thank her enough.”