Came in: 1995 Picture: ___

It first belonged to Mr. Ming’s sister Maxine, but he couldn’t resist stealing it. “She would leave it careless and we would read it,” he said. When Maxine caught him, she took what was hers but gave him the exterior. He started writing short entries next to “names and addresses of females I used to mess with”. Decades later, Mr. Ming said “It’s memory lane.” He still flips through it, connecting again with his teenage self back in Jamaica. “I wish it was more detailed,” he said. Today he works as an electrician and lives in East Harlem. Five of Mr. Ming’s siblings are in New York, including Maxine, and they have dinner together every Thursday.

* Zongluan Ouyang, 27 | Came from: Fujian Province, China |

Came in: February, 2005 Picture: ___

Mr. Ouyang is a Methodist now, not a Buddhist. He goes by the name Roy. And he no longer wears this item that his parents gave him when he left his fishing village “to keep him safe”. Instead it sits in a cluttered desk drawer in the single room he rents in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It is one of the only things he still has from home. One recent afternoon, Mr. Ouyang looked at this object for the first time in ages. “It reminds me of my parents,” he said. They were not educated, and would recognise little of his life in Brooklyn, where Mr. Ouyang works as a wedding photographer. But he said, “They understand me.”

* Ruth Heiman, 87 | Came from: Nuremburg, Germany via England |

Came in: 1947 Picture: ___

Mrs. Heiman keeps it with others of its kind, but it means something very different from the other pieces. It was her mother’s, saved somehow from the concentration camp where her parents were killed. Mrs. Heiman said: “All my life until now I tried to push the past out of my mind. I live in the present. But there are certain things you don’t give up.” It’s just about all she has from her mother, who stayed in Germany when Mrs. Heiman, then 15 went to stay with relatives in England to escape the Nazis. She had no idea she would never see her parents again. Mrs. Heiman fell in love with an American soldier in England. They were married for 50 years. He died in 1997. Mrs. Heiman, who lives in Fresh Meadows, Queens, plans to give it to her granddaughter or daughter-in-law. Touching it as she spoke, she said “Without it some of my past would be lost.”

* Huan Zheng, 28 | Came from: Fujian Province, China |