Eesley Family Group Portrait, c. 1948–1949

A formal Eesley family group portrait taken c. 1948–1949 at Charles and Lillie Dale Eesley’s home in Bexley, Ohio — the leafy Columbus suburb that was the family’s center for forty years. The Bexley location is per Aunt Maggie’s identification in a 2019 family email thread: “The first photo was taken at Charles and Lilly’s home. Stella and Ted there too.”

The date narrows from the wider late-1940s–1960s window by triangulating apparent ages against birth/death dates:

• Stella (b. October 1925) reads as early twenties in the frame — fits 22 to 24, i.e. 1947–1949.
• Helen (b. January 1924) reads similar — fits 23 to 25, also 1947–1949.
• Lily Dale (b. 1877) looks around seventy, not eighty-plus, which she would be if the photo were 1957 onward.
• Hair and dress styles read postwar mid-to-late 1940s: rolled women’s hair, structured shoulders.
• Stella came to Bexley around 1942–1943 (after Lyle’s July 1942 death at Cabanatuan); the photo is several years into the household-as-permanent-kinship period the family memory describes.
• No children of Stella and Ted’s are in the frame, suggesting it’s pre- or very-early-marriage.

Eleven people, all now identified by Chuck via face-tagging the print in 2026, with additional context from Aunt Jeanne, Aunt Maggie, cousin Roberta (who transmitted the family label), FamilySearch records, and Ted Chong’s 2013 obituary.

The family label that came with the print was transmitted by Roberta Burnes — the cousin who holds the largest surviving collection of Charles Leonard’s 1940s correspondence and who has been the family’s connection to the wartime years of this Bexley household. Chuck face-tagged each figure on the print in 2026 to lock the positions; the cast below lists each named figure with where they stand in the frame.

Front row, left to right:

• Thelma G. Haughn — at the far left, in a pale jacket. Engaged to Dale Eesley when he died young in 1939; she stayed close to the family until her own death in the 1970s.
• Don’s Peggy — Peggy Yeoman / Youman Eesley — beside Thelma, dark wavy hair. Donald Stuart “Don” Eesley’s wife. Family memory carries two spellings of her maiden name — Yeoman (per the family label that came with this print) and Youman (per Bean’s 1985 register) — both variants in use.
• Will’s Peggy — Margaret Jane McMaster Eesley — front center, young woman with darker straight hair, Will’s wife and Chuck’s paternal grandmother. The two Peggys in this generation, by marriage to Will and to Don respectively, are both in this frame.
• Grandma Eesley — Lily Dale Chenoweth Eesley — middle of the front, the matriarch (b. 1877, d. 1970). The family label uses the “Lily” spelling of her first name; Bean’s 1985 register uses “Lillie.” Both variants are in family use.
• Will Eesley — front right, in suit and light tie. Chuck’s grandfather, the architect.

Back row, left to right:

• Don Eesley — middle-left of the back row, in suit and dark tie. Will’s brother.
• Mary Eesley Bean — beside Don, woman with dark wavy hair. Will’s sister and author of the 1985 family history that supplies much of this archive’s relationship backbone. The family label from Roberta describes her position as “behind Will’s Peggy,” which matches the back-row spot she occupies above and to the left of her young sister-in-law in the front row.
• Bill Bean — at the top, laughing, behind Lily Dale. Mary’s husband.
• Stella Sunn Chong — behind Will, smiling.
• Helen Louise (Eesley) Burnes — back right, between Stella and Ted. The youngest of Charles Leonard and Lily Dale’s eight children (b. 16 January 1924) and Will Eesley’s sister; mother of Roberta Burnes, the cousin who transmitted the family label that came with this print. Helen’s identification was made by Chuck in 2026; the figure had been previously read as a possible East Asian relative of Stella and Ted before Chuck recognised her.
• Dr. Chong Ted Wah Sing, M.D. — far right, beside Helen. Stella’s husband, given here in his full Chinese name.

Four Eesley siblings of Will’s generation are in this photograph: Will himself, Don, Mary (Bean), and Helen (Burnes). With both their parents — Charles Leonard and Lily Dale — in the same frame, plus the in-laws and Stella, the photograph is a substantial gathering of the wartime-and-postwar Eesley household.

Stella’s route to Bexley

The family label reads “Stella was from the Philippines” — in fact the Philippines was a waypoint, not her origin. Her route went Hawaii → Philippines → Ohio, and the middle leg is the part the family memory preserves but the structured record cannot yet explain.

What is documented:

• Stella Elaine Sunn was born October 5, 1925, in Honolulu, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii (FamilySearch L614-Z2P, seven supporting sources). Her parents Koon Hung Sunn and Mabel Lee Sunn were both Hawaii-born Chinese-Americans.
• In 1940 the Sunns were recorded in Representative District 5, Oahu (her mother Mabel returned to Honolulu that same year aboard the SS Monterey, Hawaii passenger lists).
• By 1942 or 1943 Stella was in Bexley, Ohio, in Charles Leonard Eesley’s household — the wartime shelter Aunt Jeanne described in 2019, framed in family memory as Charles Leonard refusing to let a young Chinese-American on the West Coast end up in an internment camp.

What is not yet documented — how Stella reached the Philippines from Hawaii in the first place, and what brought her from there to Ohio. The boat from Manila is the family-memory trace of the second leg, recoverable in principle from wartime civilian passenger manifests. The first leg — the Hawaii-to-Philippines move — is the open question. Stella was seventeen or eighteen when she arrived in Bexley.

Roberta Burnes’s collection of Charles Leonard’s 1940s letters is the single most consequential undeciphered source on this question; the handwriting has not yet been worked through.

That Stella and Ted are in this 1948–1949 frame — by then with their own household and lives, the wartime shelter having become permanent kinship — is the same record viewed from five or six years downstream.