06/19/2025
With the sun setting and the winds howling on January 7, Houri Marganian and her family raced out of their Altadena neighborhood as the Eaton Fire exploded a mile away, believing they’d never see their home again. They hastily stuffed Marganian’s collection of thousands of family photos, neatly organized in about a dozen boxes, into the trunk of her husband’s car.
“He left the neighborhood,” says Marganian, and then “the trunk popped open.”
The boxes tumbled out and the ferocious winds did the rest, scattering decades of non-digitized photos in all directions.
“I was trying to collect them with my 12-year-old as the wind was blowing, suffocating us with the smoke, and we could see the embers coming down,” Marganian recalls. “Everything was happening so fast because of the wind.”
They gathered just a fraction of the photos before they had to keep moving.
At first, Marganian considered posting something online about the lost pictures. But after seeing the full extent of the devastation in Altadena, and receiving confirmation that her own home survived, the photos seemed less important.
Then, she began getting some very surprising text messages.
“Someone has your pictures up on their social media,“ Marganian recalls reading. “Random pictures, like honeymoon pictures, pregnancy pictures, dating pictures.”
Through the efforts of Altadena resident Claire Schwartz, about 200 of those lost photos have been returned. Some of the prints she got back, including images of her childhood in Lebanon, were damaged by smoke, soot, and car tires.
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Original reporting by Steven Cuevas
