Family photos, mementos unlock window to the past

The faces of my family stared at me from old photographs, people in black-and-white I didn’t recognize. Their blood ran through my veins, but I didn’t know their names or what they did in life.

Finding the photos, in a cedar chest in my mother’s Arizona home after she died in 2010, was like opening a door to another world. At a time when much of what we do is shared through social media, instantly and with everyone, the people in these photos occupied a lost place.

They had posed for posterity, and here I was, eager to greet them.

Neither of my siblings wanted the collection of photographs. There were hundreds of them, too, including some taken in the late 1890s. I couldn’t stop looking at them.

I recognized my parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins — myself at my baby luau. But there were people from previous generations I had never seen before. Serious, scowling people.

Only a handful of photographs had names written on them, but even that was confusing. Without my mother, the last of her generation, I had no way to know the depth of my connection to those people. This was the reality of a childhood in Hawaii, I told myself.

Growing up in Kailua in the 1960s meant that my family lived an isolated existence. All our relatives were on the mainland. I saw them maybe three or four times during my childhood. Back then long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive, so we rarely talked to our grandparents (or cousins) and that led to even fewer conversations about them. The idea that we had other relatives never came up.

I shipped the cedar chest to Hawaii with a loose plan to organize the photographs and scan them into my computer. I didn’t want my relatives to drift any further into oblivion.

But the chest offered an array of discoveries that went beyond photographs. There was history I could touch: The yellowed newspaper obituary of a great-great-grandfather, an Indiana sheriff who fought for the North in the Civil War; the baby booties of my maternal grandfather, an Oklahoma Sooner born in 1895; miscellaneous souvenirs from my mother’s first trip to Hawaii in 1955, including Matson menus with Eugene Savage illustrations and her diary, which I have yet to read.

I found typed letters postmarked from my parents’ Oahu Avenue home, their first together. I found a news clipping about my late father being wounded in World War II and, to my amazement, realized I was reading it on the anniversary of that day.

But the photos refused to reveal their secrets. This was a bittersweet realization until I found a box of Kodachrome slides that were taken not long after my parents met in Honolulu in 1955.

I had never seen my parents this way. Every other photo from that time in their life was in black and white, soft on focus. In every photo after that, they were older.

These color images were so sharp that when I held the slide viewer to my face, it was as if my parents were standing in front of me.

They were a gift for posterity, a time machine of the heart. And truth be told, I put them on Facebook.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.