Marietta Chong, Will, Stella, Ted, and Helen — 230 N. Cassady Avenue, c. April 1945

A labeled five-person outdoor group photograph taken at 230 N. Cassady Avenue, Bexley, Franklin County, Ohio — the Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Eesley family house — on Stella and Ted’s wedding day, c. April 1945. The KISCO Certified Photo Service stamp on the back reads APR 10 1945, fixing the development date to the same week as the Tidal Basin cherry-blossom photograph.

The cast — labeled

The handwritten caption on the back of the print, in blue ink, names all five figures:

• Marietta Chong — at left, in a dark floral-print dress; Ted’s sister, the maid-of-honor or close family attendant.
• Will Eesley — Stella’s brother (and Chuck’s grandfather), in a tweed suit and fedora hat, holding a camera. The presence of the family-side architect on Stella’s wedding day is one of the only direct documentary contacts in this archive between Stella’s Chong-side branch and the rest of the Eesley line.
• Stella Sunn (Chong) — center, in a dark wool wedding coat with large white buttons over what is presumably her wedding dress. The caption uses her full married name — Sunn (Chong) — preserving her Chinese-American surname Sunn alongside her married name Chong.
• Ted Chong — in his U.S. Navy double-breasted dark dress uniform with brass buttons, the same uniform he wears in the 10 April 1945 cherry-blossom portrait.
• Helen (Eesley) Burnes — at right, in a dark turtleneck-style sweater dress with a slim belt. Helen was twenty-one years old at her sister-in-law’s wedding day — the youngest of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale’s surviving children.

Why the photograph matters

It is the first documented photograph of Will and Helen Eesley together with Stella and Ted Chong in this archive — the first direct frame of the Eesley side of the family meeting the Chong side. The Bexley house at 230 N. Cassady was the structural anchor of the Eesley household in the 1930s and 1940s; Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale lived there from the late 1920s through the rest of their lives, and the house was the venue of Scioto “Aunt Ota” Chenoweth Smith’s 9 February 1930 death and the family gatherings of the children who survived the Pacific war.

The caption’s “about 1942-5” dating preserved the family memory of the wedding window. The KISCO APR 10 1945 stamp settles the question: the photograph was developed in April 1945, the wedding sits in the same month.

What it adds to Stella’s biography

The caption “Stella Sunn (Chong)” is the documentary back-of-the-print form of her maiden surname — matching the Sunn spelling carried on her parents Koon Hung Sunn and Mabel Lee Sunn and on her own page’s aka field.

Source: Eesley family archive; surfaced June 2026 by Roberta Burnes Walker. KISCO Certified Photo Service stamp dated APR 10 1945. Handwritten caption naming all five figures and the 230 N. Cassady address.