Eye on the Esplanade: Lost and found history

By Medicine Hat News on January 25, 2019.

History can be lost over time, but it can also be rediscovered. Faded stories can come back into focus by combining records such as photographs with memory and other information at hand.

In 2016, the Esplanade Archives received a set of 40 glass plate negatives, carefully housed in an antique tobacco tin. Glass plate negatives were a prevalent photographic format in the late 19th and early 20th century, but were expensive and fragile. Photographing with them took significant skill.

The images are of the Jenkins family. After the tragic passing of the family’s patriarch, Mary Ann Jenkins moved from England to the Medicine Hat area with three of her sons and one daughter. By the early 1900s when the photographs were taken, the children were adults. These images add texture to the family’s story with a combination of well-focused portraits and capturing daily life.

The story of these glass plates is almost as interesting as the images they hold. These negatives were found in the 1960s on an old homestead between Walsh and Schuler. Knowing they were likely important to someone, the Lehr family became their custodians. With no easy way of viewing them, they held onto them for half a century. They didn’t know whose faces and what places were within these inverted black and white images on delicate glass.

In 2016 the glass plates were brought to a show-and-tell event of the Historical Society of Medicine Hat and District. At that meeting, Tony Giesinger, a man with a keen sense of history and an inquisitive mind, asked to work with the photos, to scan them and try to identify the people and places within. Tony connected the homestead on which the images were rediscovered to the Jenkins family. He found some likenesses to them in community history books and contacted known descendants who still live in the area.

A few mysteries remain. We do not know the photographer. It was obviously someone with skill as the images are of a very high quality. There is no consensus on identification of many of the faces in these century-old photos. We must rely on the memories of those who knew the subjects in their later years. We only have confirmed identification of photographs of some members of the family. While there is confidence in the identity of some faces and places, there are other images for which there are no clues.

The knowledge of our stories is not set in stone, but it is vibrant. Discovering records such as old photographs, whether personal discovery or one for the whole community, allows for learning and debate. Not all mysteries will be solved, but the more dots that are connected, the fuller those stories will be.

Some of these images are currently on display in the Archives vignette, Images Through Fragile Glass. To see these images in person and read more about the Jenkins family, visit the Esplanade Galleries. The vignette will be on display until Feb. 23.

Philip Pype is Archivist at the Esplanade.

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