Restoring a Family Ghost

Some months ago, I came across a smattering of random family photographs at my parents’ house. The house had experienced some flooding during Hurricane Sandy, and the pictures, having been rather unsentimentally stored in the garage, were damaged—not terribly, but enough to make them brittle, to make them seem older than they were, to make them somehow strange, like daguerreotypes sold at flea markets. In the pile I found a very old group photo: my tiny maternal grandfather plopped on his mother’s lap, surrounded by people who must have been family but whose identities now seemed irrevocably lost. My mother held the fraying sepia image and lamented not knowing,