"Discovering" Family Memorabilia

One of the main differences between my house and my paternal grandparents' house is the number of old pictures on display and in storage. Our displays of family photos are limited to a collection of photos on the top of the TV cabinet and a family portrait on top of the piano. The standard display photos are up there - my parent's wedding portrait, high school portraits of my brother and me, a picture of me when I was about 2, and a few pictures of my mother and her sisters. The other photos are stored in neatly organized boxes or albums, in contrast to my grandparents' house, where it's impossible to take 2 steps without seeing a set of family photos.

I thought I had seen most of the family pictures at my house when I was doing the laundry the other day. Some of my maternal grandparents' belongings sit in boxes in the basement, so from time to time I've looked at them while waiting for a load of clothes to finish. One box had a few random, mislabeled manila folders. I lifted up the folders to see if there was anything else, and found an off-white photo album bound with generic yellow tape. There was an assortment of pictures of my mother, her sisters, and their cousins, my two ex-uncles, my maternal grandparents and my great-aunts and great-uncles, photos that had probably been unseen for over 15 years. And all it took to find them was a little laundry-induced boredom.