| By wetaskiwintimes.com,
on 01-09-2010 19:54 
|
Favoured : 3 |
Goal for smaller communities is to archive their past online
"We can often provide pictures and other information." While people searching for a family connection to their past is the main request for City's archives department, it's far from the only one. Archivist Carolyn Hill said staff have even helped supply background materials for a murder case, which took place in Eastern Canada. Hill revealed the matter during her report to city council at its Aug. 23 regular meeting. "We got a request a few years ago on a girl who had been murdered in the United States, in California.""The case was reopened, and the detective contacted us to see if we had any information about her so they could put a face to the victim." "This was a long time after the murder. " "Just last year, I saw in the newspaper, I was in Halifax, they had actually convicted (the person). They had finally caught the person who had done it – her ex-boyfriend – and had finally convicted him because of DNA evidence." "Part of the portrait they showed of the person, as the victim, was some of the information that we had provided to them," said Hill. RCMP has also been known to use the City's extensive archives to help with an investigation. "We have a collection of old telephone books back to the 1950s, so they go through those, tracking people and where they've lived," explained Hill. Yet, bulk of requests the archivist department handles are from people with an interest in tracing their family roots, otherwise known as genealogy. "A lot of people contact us from England, from the United States, Australia, Norway, Sweden … Ireland because their families moved here, and they have lost track of them." Another interesting request, pointed out by Hill, is from people who own an older home and they are looking to find out how it was built, and how the structure has changed over the years. Wetaskiwin a small community of 12,000Meanwhile, Hill told council that the department is in the midst of making digital copies of the photographs of Carl Walin, who had his own photography business in Wetaskiwin from 1919 to 1959. "It's a huge collection. It's deteriorating. We have to get them reformatted, and also you can't print eight by 10 negatives, easily, anymore, so we have to get them reformatted," Hill told council. An estimated 5,000 images have already been converted, with many of them appearing online, but Hill told city council that there are about 100,000 more photographs to go. The photos, 1,000 of them, have already been posted online, and are used extensively for books and displays and researchers. Hill said the department would like to do more with the collection, and one of the ideas being bantered about is a possible coffeetable book. Wetaskiwin and District Heritage Museum Last update: 03-09-2010 00:33
|