The Coronado Historical Association invites the community to a special presentation, “The Road to Sunrise,” featuring photographer Marsha Steckling and writer Ray Agostinelli, a couple from Boulder, Colorado, whose sixteen-year investigation into a box of century-old negatives led them further out west to a house on Ocean Boulevard and a historic Coronado family.
The story began in 2009, when Steckling paid seventy-five dollars for four small, weathered folios in a Denver antique shop. Inside were over six hundred negatives, meticulously catalogued by an unnamed photographer, dating from 1929 to 1938. The images told two distinct stories: a close-knit, affluent family at ease in a grand seaside home, and a rugged mining crew at work in the high desert of what is now Joshua Tree National Park.
A 2022 visit to the Coronado Historical Association, and a meeting with Curator of Collections Vickie Stone, gave Steckling and Agostinelli the crucial information they needed to unlock the mysteries of the collection. The home in question was 545 Ocean Boulevard — the historic Millar-Geary House — and the photographer was Edward Alexander Millar, Jr., a mining engineer and son of Brigadier General Edward Alexander Millar, Sr. The forebears of the house’s first residents traced back to Civil War general and San Francisco’s first mayor, John White Geary.
The couple’s search for living descendants of the family, spanning genealogy databases, military records, and social media, culminated in a gratifying connection with modern-day relatives in Switzerland and Virginia, where the folios will ultimately join the family’s personal archive.
The presentation will cover the restoration process behind bringing century-old negatives back to life, the detective work involved in identifying the family and the mining operation captured in the photos, and the emotional experience of reconnecting a lost collection with the descendants of the people who appear in it. Attendees can expect a rich visual presentation featuring restored photographs from the collection, many displayed publicly for the first time.
Marsha Steckling is a professional photographer specializing in dog and family portraits, and a longtime volunteer photographer for the Longmont (CO) Humane Society. Her background in pre-digital photography sparked a lasting interest in photo restoration and historical preservation. Ray Agostinelli is a technology professional, creative writer, and podcast producer whose work has been recognized at the Austin Film Festival. Marsha and Ray met in Boulder, Colorado, in 2001, and have been researching and restoring this collection together since 2020.
The presentation coincides with the couple’s forthcoming book, The Road to Sunrise, which documents the full restoration and research process.
The Coronado Historical Association museum is located at 1100 Orange Avenue. Tickets and information at coronadohistory.org or 619-435-7242.
