As I was going through my Mom’s album of family photos from the 70s and 80s, I came across an envelope tucked between the pages. I was delighted to find that it contained a collection of medium format slides that seemed mostly pretty well-preserved. I don’t have the equipment required to scan slides this large, so I packaged them up and sent them off to ScanCafe—ironically, all the way back to Illinois, where these slides sat for decades before I carted them off to California—to be digitized.

I was delighted with the resulting images. The slides contained photos of my father, his mother, father, paternal grandparents, and three of his brothers; his four other brothers hadn’t been born yet. Some of the pictures were formal portraits, which allowed me to date them to 1947: they conveniently included a calendar and a clock as part of the setting. Others featured Dad and his brothers boxing in a basement and what Dad thinks might be one of his uncles’ cars outside the laundry his grandparents ran.

I took home a couple additional albums when we returned from our Christmas visit to Elk Grove Village this year. I don’t expect to find anything as surprising as these pictures inside them, but anything’s possible: if I’ve learned one lesson over the last year, it’s that my mother loved to stash things in unexpected places.

Gallery: Wong Family 1947