In April 2016, I discovered an unusually heavy cardboard box buried under a 20-year accumulation of “stuff” in the rarely used bedroom closet of the summerhouse portion of our 1876 Annville, Pennsylvania farmhouse. It must have come into my possession after my father died in October 2004, when we also received a steel cabinet that contained files that he had deemed to be important enough to keep when he retired after 37 years as an officer in the U.S. Army. I was dumbstruck to discover that the box contained some 1,500 35mm color slides that my dad had taken from 1946, when he was assigned to serve in post-war Japan, through 1968, when he held his last command at Ft. McNair, Virginia. Except for a handful of hard-copy photos made from the slides, I had never seen any of the images, including many that showed me growing up.

This discovery prompted me to dig through the file cabinet, which sat in a distant corner of our large studio for over a decade; there was little time to sort out files of papers in a business for which there were never enough hours of the day to keep it moving forward. I still have many documents to review, but I was delighted to find scrapbooks that I assume were compiled for my father by office staff during all of his commands as a general officer. Most astonishing of all was an album my mother had created during her teen years and several she made of our family, starting when we joined my father in Japan and ending when I was in high school. It didn’t take long before these priceless photos, letters, and mementos had taken over our house.

How could I have not known about my dad’s slides or my mother’s scrapbooks? I guess when you move as often as we did (34 moves while I was at home), by the time the film was developed, we were packing up to move again. I don’t remember my dad taking pictures, so he must have been pretty sneaky. As for family pictures, I grew up with several framed professional portraits my parents made of me before I hit the awkward teen years — I’m thankful they had the good sense not to preserve those years for posterity. The only other ones of me were my high school and college senior portraits. And there were portraits of my parents when they were a young married couple and some beautiful studio portraits of several generations of their ancestors.

So what I had, in effect, was a priceless time capsule just waiting for discovery when the time was right, thanks to the long-ago thoughtfulness of my parents.

Nearly a year later, the most stunning event happened while I was clearing out a stall in our long-neglected horse barn. It had become a magnet for stuff no one wanted to deal with because we were too busy running two studios and raising two full-time kids, one part-time kid, countless dogs, cats, a goat, two ponies, and a donkey.

After emptying the stall, I saw the corner of an old-fashioned suitcase or “grip” as my southern ancestors would describe it. I could barely lift it and had a hard time opening it as it was over-stuffed and almost impossible to unlatch. In it were treasures from my mother’s family that had been saved by my eccentrically OCD uncle, Jack, my mother’s brother, who had passed away in 1999 at the age of 90.

It took days to sort through the thousands of photos, diaries clippings, bits of paper with names and dates, calendars, and — best of all — letters from family members to my grandmother (his mother) that brought scores of my Billingsley and Inman relatives to life. I am eternally grateful to my dear, odd Uncle Jack, and for the unknowable circumstances that placed his suitcase full of priceless family history in our barn. It is truly his legacy that I hope will be enjoyed not only by my family, but also by his future descendants. That is . . . if I can live long enough to archive it all.