LangleyAdvance Your community newspaper since 1931
Friday, July 30, 2010
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Audited circulation: 41,100 – 36 pages
History revived from archive
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pg A18
Langley heritage
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Brigade Days at the Fort
Langley Centennial Museum is adding old news photos to the historic record.
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,” by Matthew Claxton Edwards said of Betty, who not only rememmclaxton@langleyadvance.com bers a lot of the Advance photos from when Piecing together the history of Langley they were taken, but notices small details: should be easy, if you have a vast archive of in one picture, she spotted the hood of her photos stretching back decades. husband’s car. Unless those photos are largely unlabelled, The members of the group each have their sometimes undated, and own “neighbourhood of experunsorted. tise,” said Kobi Howard, a curator The Langley Centennial at the museum. “There are Museum is now trying to put Local historian Warren Sommer photographs some order into the chaos has also been a help to the effort. of buildings of Langley Advance photo Some of the more mysterious archives from the 1950s to photos in the collection have been that don’t exist the 1970s. published in the Advance this anymore, or When it’s finished later year, and resulting tips buildings that this year, the project will from the public have give Langley residents online also helped. have burned access to more than 900 of Howard rememdown.” the most significant of the bers a mysteriAdvance’s old photos, comous phone call. Lisa Edwards plete with as much historical The caller information as the museum started talkcan dig up. ing about “the boy The first stage of the project started with with the skunk,” and it piles of photos, said Lisa Edwards, the curatook Howard a while torial assistant who is scanning and organto remember that it izing the photos. was the subject of a Identifying some of the photos was photo that had been straightforward. The dates they ran in the featured in the paper are written on the backs, and they Advance, as can be cross-checked with microfilm of old part of the issues of the Advance. project, a But many didn’t run at all. For example, few weeks this week Edwards was sorting through a earlier. 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.
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.
Lisa Edwards is sorting through hundreds of old photos donated by the Langley Advance to the Centennial Museum’s collection. Matthew Claxton Langley Advance