Kardas collection

Raymond "Ray" Stanley Kardas was born January 24, 1921, to Andrew and Mary Kardas and grew up in Connecticut. He served in World War II and was stationed in England, France, and Germany. Upon his return to the United States at the end of the war, he began working as an engineer at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and married Virginia "Jinny" Becker in 1947. He and Jinny adopted Susan P. Field around 1950. The family moved to Florida in the late 1950s or early 1960s where Ray began work as an engineer at the Cape Canaveral National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) base. During his time with NASA, Ray began scrapbooking photographs of trips and moments in his life into handmade photo albums, a hobby he continued for the rest of his life.

Ray and Jinny retired to Los Angeles, California in the 1970s, where they were frequently visited by their daughter, Sue and her husband, Edward Larrabee. It was during Ray’s retirement that he began compiling a daily photo diary, in which he would place at least one photo a day into handmade albums. Throughout his life, he and his family traveled extensively through Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Central America. Ray and Jinny moved to St George, Utah in the early 2000s to be closer to their daughter. Here, Ray experimented for the first time with digital photography. He died in Hurricane, Utah in 2013.

Virginia "Jinny" Rose Becker Kardas was born in rural Connecticut in 1922 to Alex and Rose Becker. She attended Boston College planning to major in science. She had a great love of animals, plants, history, literature, and medieval architecture. During World War II, she worked in Washington, D.C. as a newsreader in the Pentagon. She met her future husband, Raymond S. Kardas through their mutual love of learning and the arts around 1947, and adopted their daughter, Susan Field in 1950. While Jinny never worked outside of the home, she continued to develop her interest in art through oil painting and ceramics, eventually acquiring a kiln and pursuing her passion in medieval European architecture, constructing ceramic cathedrals and castles modeled after those she visited on her family's travels. She died in Hurricane, Utah in 2011.

Susan P. Field Kardas was born in 1947 and was adopted by Ray and Jinny around 1950. She received a BA from the University of California and went on to obtain a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology / Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania) in 1971. In 1966, she married Edward Larrabee and started going officially by the last name of Kardas. In 1975, they formed the contracting firm, Historic Sites Research, based originally in Princeton, New Jersey. She and Edward had many pets, most notably cats and dogs, often competing in dog shows and dog sled races. They moved their firm to Southern Utah in 1996, and she and Edward retired to Hurricane, Utah. Together they wrote archaeology reports for the local area, including the Orson B. Adams Farmstead in Harrisburg, Utah. She died in 2016.

Edward Conyers McMillan Larrabee was born on August 21, 1932, in Oxford, England. He graduated from Reed College in 1955 and began a career in historical archaeology with Washington State Parks. He continued his historical archaeology education with an MA from the University of Washington in 1958, and a doctorate at Columbia University in 1970. For a number of years, he worked on projects for the National Park Service, including studies related to John Brown’s raid and the military facilities at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Appomattox Court House in Virginia, and the Civil War defenses of Washington, D.C. He was senior archaeologist at the restoration of the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. He taught in the anthropology departments of Hunter College and John Jay College (City University of New York) and was a founding member of the Society for Historical Archaeology. He lived in New Jersey for most of his career, but retired with Sue to Hurricane, Utah in 1996, where he died in 2006.