[BCMA] Langley Museum: History revived from archive

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History revived from archive
Langley Centennial Museum is adding old news photos to the historic record.

By Matthew Claxton, Langley Advance      July 30, 2010

Read more at: http://www.langleyadvance.com/History+revived+from+archive/3341518/story.html#ixzz0vlL7TWwI



Piecing together the history of Langley should be easy, if you have a vast archive of photos stretching back decades. Unless those photos are largely unlabelled, sometimes undated, and unsorted.



The Langley Centennial Museum is now trying to put some order into the chaos of Langley Advance newspaper photo archives from the 1950s to the 1970s.



When it's finished later this year, the project will give Langley residents online access to more than 900 of the most significant of the Advance's old photos, complete with as much historical information as the museum can dig up.



The first stage of the project started with piles of photos, said Lisa Edwards, the curatorial assistant who is scanning and organizing the photos.



Identifying some of the photos was straightforward. The dates they ran in the paper are written on the backs, and they can be cross-checked with microfilm of old issues of the Advance. But many didn't run at all. For example, this week Edwards was sorting through a pile of 40 photos taken during the 1960 May Day celebrations in Fort Langley.



For those that aren't dated, Edwards is leaning on a core group of museum volunteers, all of them longtime Langley residents whose memories stretch back decades.



Volunteers lending hands to the photo project, Alice Johnson, Ellen Worrell, Doris Blair, and Betty Cox, are part of a "history group" that aids museum staff on a regular basis. Cox is the daughter-in-law of late Advance editor E.J. Cox, who was responsible for the very first edition of the paper to hit the streets in 1931, 79 years ago this month.



"Her memory is absolutely phenomenal," Edwards said of Betty, who not only remembers a lot of the Advance photos from when they were taken, but notices small details: in one picture, she spotted the hood of her husband's car.



The members of the group each have their own "neighbourhood of expertise," said Kobi Howard, a curator at the museum. Local historian Warren Sommer has also been a help to the effort.



Some of the more mysterious photos in the collection have been published in the Advance this year, and resulting tips from the public have also helped. Howard remembers a mysterious phone call. The caller started talking about "the boy with the skunk," and it took Howard a while to remember that it was the subject of a photo that had been featured in the Advance, as part of the project, a few weeks earlier.



Edwards has been working on the project since May, and is now becoming an expert at identifying famous Langley residents of past decades. She easily tells apart D.W. Poppy Sr. and Jr., for example.



The photo project is about more than identification.



"It's also preservation," Edwards said. The photos are often unique, and as newspaper photos, they tend to be of higher quality than snapshots, and they focus on community life. A digital record will now be available, in case anything ever happens to the originals, as well. That will help preserve Langley's vanishing history.



"There are photographs of buildings that don't exist anymore," Edwards said, "or buildings that have burned down."



Once each photo has been identified and dated, it will be given a unique number and officially added to the collection, along with everything known about it. If and when more information emerges about the photo in the future, it will be easy to find it and add the data.



The goal is to finish the project by the end of December. Identification of the boxes of photos provided to the museum by the Langley Advance has been made possible by a $7,000 grant from UBC's Irving K. Barber Learning Centre Digitization Project.

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