This is a collection of Lost and Found classified advertisements from the online community known as craigslist. It is not meant to serve as conduit to answer the advertisements, but rather, as a portrait of the people of America — their gratitude, their generosity, their hopefulness, and their fallibility.

Ads have been collected from five major US cities: Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. These cities were chosen in an attempt to bring a broader sample of America as a whole, both in terms of geography and culture.

Ads were chosen for their originality, humor, insight, compassion, and emotion. The collection itself is a study into what is important, both large and small, to Americans today. As such, we invite your comments to add to the collective understanding.

The collective entries are excerpts which have been edited from their original form in an effort to report the news without devaluing the original source. Typos, grammatical errors, and misspellings have been left intact to retain authenticity.

Please visit the active original ad linked and noted at the bottom of each entry to see the listing in its entirety. Older ads may no longer be active since craigslist only keeps their posts visible for a limited time. You may also visit craigslist.org/laf for each individual city to see all the lost and found ads.