One by one, the tips trickle in. “That’s my grandpa,” one person writes.
“I’ll check but I think this is my Uncle Harry,” says another.
For volunteers at the online Flin Flon Heritage Project (FFHP), each tidbit is a chance to move closer, if only slightly, to a more complete historical record of the community.
While the FFHP boasts some 12,000 Flin Flon and area photos, the five Ws behind each picture – especially the Who? – tend to be murky.
“A lot, particularly the very old ones,” says FFHP founder Doug Evans when asked how many photos fall into the “mystery” category.
But with ample help from a public viewing such photos online, Evans says the FFHP has a good track record of solving the mysteries.
Occasionally The Reminder has lent a hand, publishing mystery photos and asking readers to call or email if they have information. The response, particularly from older readers, has been strong.
Clues
Often, a mystery photo contains clues. A recent picture showed a group of people wearing Legion blazers, indicating the event was most certainly related to the veterans’ advocacy organization.
Within a week, FFHP had the names of all but one person in the photo.
Each photo that comes to the FFHP is posted online and listed in a spreadsheet that tracks all known details of the picture.
“The spreadsheet is dynamic,” Evans says. “It’s being updated all the time as new information comes in.”
FFHP is much more than photos, however. Since its 2012 launch, the website has grown by the week.
Volunteers have more or less finished digitizing the complete collection of Northern Lights, the venerable company and community magazine published by Hudbay.
“Northern Lights contains a trove of history because they wrote about a lot of things besides the mine,” says Evans.
Most Hapnot Collegiate yearbooks are also scanned and online, though the site will delay posting newer yearbooks so as not to hinder sales of hard copies.
Also being scanned are early editions of the Flin Flon Daily Miner, the community’s first newspaper. The scans are done at Manitoba’s legislative archives in Winnipeg.
The FFHP posts other publications as well, though Evans admits the question of copyright is a blurry one.
“We really don’t know what copyright issues there are because we have people who have written ‘copyright’ on pictures that were taken in 1922 by Lord knows who,” he says. “So we have just followed the policy that if it’s about Flin Flon we’ll put it on the site and if somebody says ‘take it off’ we take it off.”
As its title suggests, the FFHP is dominated by the past, but there are some contemporary images and articles as well.
“What happened yesterday we leave to the newspaper,” Evans says. “We don’t have a strict rule. If someone has a picture that they think should be kept in the history of the town, we put it in.”
One development that excites FFHP volunteers is the website’s incorporation of photos from the Flin Flon Archives, located in the basement of the Flin Flon Public Library.
The website is now functioning as an index to the Archives, Evans says, something that didn’t exist before.
Looking ahead, Evans hopes that at some point the Flin Flon Public Library can include a dedicated terminal allowing people to browse the FFHP.
He also believes the FFHP could spur interest from a university interested in turning Flin Flon into a centre of study for small communities.
About 50 volunteers are now working on the FFHP. Most no longer live in Flin Flon, which just goes to show the old saying: once a Flin Flonner, always a Flin Flonner.
Visit the website at Flinflonheritageproject.com.
