Vintage collector reunites family with 60-year-old album

• By Su Fu-nan and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporter, with staff writer

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A Kaohsiung vintage item collector has reunited a family with a 60-year-old photo album, helping the family reconnect with a piece of their history.

Lee Huang (李煌), the former operator of a cafe famed for its extensive vinyl record collection in Kaohsiung’s Hunei District (湖內), bought a family photo album from a vendor at a market in Tainan’s Shanhua District (善化) late last year, he said on Tuesday.

The album consisted of 120 black-and-white photographs that recorded the daily life of a family, Lee said.

Vintage item collector Lee Huang, right, returns an old family album he bought from a maket last year to a granddaughter of the original owner in Kaohsiung on Tuesday.

Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times

Clues in the photos led him to identify the family patriarch as Ko Chih-sun (葛?蓀), a former patent section at the National Bureau of Standards, the predecessor of the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection and Intellectual Property Office, he said.

Lee published samples of the photos and shared his discoveries on social media, and thought that would be the end of it, he said.

To his surprise, Ko’s granddaughter Ko Huan-chun (葛奐君) contacted him in August, saying the album had belonged to her family before going missing 30 years ago, he said.

She asked to buy the album from him, as most of the people in it have since passed away and she hoped to have the photobook as a keepsake, Lee said.

Lee on Tuesday gave the album to the family free of charge, later commenting on his business Old Record Cafe’s (老唱片主題咖啡館) social media page that he had never been prouder as a vintage collector in his life.

A visibly tearful Ko Huan-chun, who traveled with her mother, Wang Yu-chih (王玉治), to meet Lee, said she was grateful he had helped save the family’s history.

Wang said her father, who was the youngest among his siblings, passed away at an early age.

Finding the album would help the family preserve its legacy, she said.

Wang said her father-in-law moved with his family from China and worked for the National Bureau of Standards for the rest of his life to raise his six children.

No one in the family could explain when or how the album went missing, or its story before being found in Tainan, he added.