Wong Family Archives

The Wong Family, a large extended family living in Yreka, Alameda, and San Francisco, California. The Photographs date between 1919 to the early 1970’s. There are almost 1,000 unidentified photographs within the collection. The Wong family owned multiple cameras and meticulously documented their daily lives. While you go through the collection, you are able to watch as family members age.

This is a collection of primarily family photographs. The images consist mostly of portraits of family members, lots of these occured outside on the front porch or the backyard of their home. They had both indoor and outdoor parties where family and friends gathered. There are images of Christmas mornings with children opening christmas presents. There are images of childrens' birthday parties, High school proms, family weddings and other events and occasions. A large part of this collection is unidentified baby photographs.

There is a section of photographs where the family traveled. For example they took a trip to a place called ghost town. There are also several rolls of film shot of nature photography. This is all found in a general street photography file.

Some of the family members include, Fred, Jessie, Gloria, Lorretta, Phyillis, Dickie, and May. There is not enough information to complete a formal family tree. In the collection, there is a copy of Gloria Joy Wong’s life insruance paperwork. From this, we gathered her mother was Jessie Elanor Wong and her father was unknown. Gloria herself had five brothers and five Sisters. She named Fredrick Wong, Loretta Cecilia Wong, and Phyillis Wong as her siblings.

One child, identified as Dickie Wong, was a student with special needs. There is a class photograph of him at school in a specialized class. Dickie lived at home as an adult, there are many paystubs addressed to him from a local store, dating to 1957.

May Wong is one of the most documented family members, she was always getting her photograph taken. Lots of these are in the same place outside of her home. As if she wanted to document each outfit she wore.

There are several veterans within the family. George Wong served during WWII with the 407th service squadron and spent part of his time in Ohio at the Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. Henry Wong was born October 22, 1924, and there is evidence in the collection that he resigned from the Navy in 1944. And Frederick Lloyd Wong was born February 4, 1932, and served during the Korean war from 1952 to 1954 and then was in the army reserve until 1961.

One of these three veterans, perhaps Frederick Wong took a camera with them when they deployed. The negatives from this are included in the collecton. There are several portaits of soliders and stills of groups of soldiers. They are in great condition for the time and circumstances of when these images were taken.

There are several sets of twins within the family, few of these photographs are labeled, but there is a folder of just twin photographs. I identified Mary and Camilla Wong from a high school graduation program, and there are several pictures of them in matching outfits throughout their childhood.

We know that this was a large family with several siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles all in the same home. This is a large extended family who lived in a big three story house located at 2203 Pacific Ave in Alameda with different relatives on each floor of the home.

Based on the prints, they may have had an at home darkroom set up where they experimented with developing film. This family, like many of the mid-20th century valued photography and documentation highly. There are many solo portraits within the collection. This collection also contains many film negatives, mainly on 120/620mm film. This access to negatives and development equipment means there are several repeat prints in this collection.