National Grandparents Day was last Sunday — You may have missed it, but Bill Byerley didn't. He spent it at his grandmother and grandfather's place. His mother was there, and his brother, too. They cooked, ate and enjoyed the conversation and companionship of close kin.
But that cozy family gathering could have been a much more somber occasion after Byerley's grandparents went missing earlier this summer. Beset by confusion on a trip to visit a friend for lunch, they took some wrong turns. They weren't found until two days later, hungry, disoriented and dehydrated. Byerley led an effort to find them, which eventually succeeded thanks largely to two things: Facebook and the kindness of strangers.
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Byerley's granparents are Vern and Elaine Schweisthal (below). Vern is 89 years old, and Elaine's 85. They've recently began dealing with the early symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia, and on July 19 climbed into their Toyota Camry for a Friday lunch date with a friend about 20 minutes away from their home in Elmhurst, Ill.

Byerley's mother has a routine with his grandparents. Almost every evening, she'll call to check in, recap their day and make sure they've taken their prescribed medicines. But when they didn't answer that evening, Byerley knew something was wrong, he tells Mashable. He cut a meeting short and drove over to their house, about 40 miles away from his own home in New Lennox, Ill.
His grandparents' car was missing. Their lights were off. The woman they were supposed to visit said they never showed up. Byerley had an uneasy feeling and couldn't reach them by cellphone, but decided to see if they came back the next morning. By about 9 a.m. on Saturday, however, there was still no sign of them and Byerley, in his own words, "knew this was something a little more serious."
Byerley is trained in search and rescue, so was quickly able to assemble a team of some 200 local volunteers to help canvass the area between his grandparents' home and the town they were supposed to visit for lunch. The group turned up nothing, and filing a missing persons report with local police turned up no immediate leads either.
But, where real-life searching alone had failed, social media and a kindhearted stranger would succeed.
Byerley, a 30-year-old web developer by trade, started a Facebook page to organize the effort to find his grandparents. The "Help Find Vernon and Elaine Schweisthal" page racked up more than 650 likes in its first two hours online. Here's an early post detailing their disappearance:
Post by Help Find Vernon and Elaine Schweisthal.
Neighbors and friends shared posts describing Vernon and Elaine with friends, who then shared with their own friends. Byerley says analytics showed posts on the page had been viewed as many as 40,000 times — which may not qualify as "viral" but is an impressive number for a word-of-mouth campaign in small-town Illinois.
On Sunday morning, nearly two full days after Vern and Elaine left their house for lunch, a tip from a woman who ran into an elderly couple at a truck stop helped narrow Byerley's search to the area around Princeton, Ill. Byerley used the Facebook page to tell people following the case to focus on the Princeton area. Another woman who lives near Princeton took that information and went for a drive, Byerley says, cruising backroads and seldom-used routes for any sign of Vern, Elaine or their Camry.
Byerley says the woman eventually located them on a remote gravel farm road. They'd run out of gas. They hadn't eaten or drunk anything for two days, and hadn't spent a cent on lodging. Elaine thought they were on vacation, and Vern thought they'd only been gone a day. They'd put a total of 950 miles on the Camry in what was originally supposed to be a 20-minute trip. Doctors took them to a nearby hospital, where they were given fluids and looked over by doctors.
Then came this joyous post:
Post by Help Find Vernon and Elaine Schweisthal.
"We were told that if they'd been there for another three or four hours, it would have been a completely different outcome because of the heat and that they hadn't had anything to eat or drink," Byerley tells Mashable.
Six days after they were found, Byerley wrote Mark Zuckerberg this open letter:
Post by Help Find Vernon and Elaine Schweisthal.
Several weeks later came Sunday's happy get-together with Byerley, his mother, brother, Vern and Elaine. Vern and Elaine now have regular in-home attendants, and Byerley says the near-disaster has helped spur some other changes in how he and other family members look after the elderly couple. But even so, National Grandparents Day served as a poignant reminder.
"We're very, very grateful we were able to celebrate something like this because there are so many other things that could have ended up happening," Byerley tells Mashable. "If not for Facebook, we never would have been able to narrow the search down like we did. It's amazing how fast word can spread."
Images: Robyn Beck/AFP/GettyImages; Facebook, Help Find Vernon and Elaine Schweisthal