Stella Sunn (Eesley) and Ted Chong — wedding portrait, c. April 1945

The formal wedding portrait of Stella Sunn Eesley and Ted Chong — c. April 1945, contemporaneous with the 10 April 1945 KISCO-stamped cherry-blossom photograph at the Washington D.C. Tidal Basin on Stella’s page. This is the canonical formal frame from the wedding day.

What the portrait shows

A full-length studio portrait against a backdrop of palm fronds and gladiolus flower arrangements. Stella stands at left in a long white satin wedding gown with a fitted bodice, a sweetheart neckline trimmed with lace, long sleeves, and a wide cathedral-length veil falling from a flower-trimmed coronet. She carries a large cascading bouquet of lilies and other white flowers, the cascade falling nearly to her knee. Ted stands at right in his U.S. Navy white dress uniform — double-breasted with brass buttons, a service ribbon bar above the left breast pocket, white belt, and white shoes. The composition is the classic 1940s wartime wedding portrait of an American serviceman and his bride; the palm-frond backdrop and gladiolus arrangements suggest the studio of a hotel-ballroom photographer or a downtown wedding-photography studio.

Why the date

The portrait is undated in family memory. The KISCO Photo Service stamp on the back of the contemporary cherry-blossom photo reads APR 10 1945, and a labeled group portrait from the same wedding day batch (7366, with handwritten cast on the back) carries the same KISCO APR 10 1945 stamp. The wedding sits c. April 1945 — four months before the end of the Pacific war.

What it documents

Stella was a Chinese-American wartime nurse who met Ted Chong, a U.S. Navy officer, during the war years. Their wedding c. April 1945 is the structural moment of the Chong-side branch of this archive — the marriage that produced their two daughters Sue Lynn and Glenn, and the line that runs into Stella’s later New Jersey life after Ted’s death.

The portrait sits alongside the 10 April 1945 cherry-blossom photograph, the Cassady Avenue wedding day group with Will and Helen Eesley, and the larger nine-person wedding day porch group at 230 N. Cassady — together the four-frame Stella-and-Ted wedding set the archive now holds from the April 1945 batch.

Source: Eesley family archive; surfaced June 2026 by Roberta Burnes Walker as part of the photograph batch that included Stella’s wedding day at 230 N. Cassady Avenue, Bexley.