When I am not working at the Library I enjoy many activities. One of them in genealogy, and another is researching and writing about the local Slovak community. Ironically, both of these personal passions inevitably take me back to the Library for a busman's holiday. It works like this : I find a few negatives in the basement. I identify them as having been taken by my grandfather Louis Mikita but I don't know when. A few of them depict a parade in Fort William which I recognize because I saw similar photos in the Thunder Bay Museum photo collection when I had done research for a book called Slovaks in Canada.So it is time to head to the Brodie Library to check their photo collection and look up details about the parade in the old newspapers. What I discovered was that it was a parade in honour of the coronation of King George VI of England in 1937. And if you thought that the world made a big fuss when Prince William married Kate Middleton, well, you would amazed to see the hoopla which accompanied this event. Marching bands come up from Minnesota, local businesses and organizations as diverse as Great Lakes Paper, the Chinese Canadian Association, the Boy Scouts and the Fort William Public Library entered elaborate floats, decorations were in every shop window and thousands of persons of all ages lined the parade route which started at the train station on Syndicate Avenue and travelled down to Victoria Avenue, Simpson Street and finally Leith Street.
Of course I was most keenly interested in the Slovak float which had been produced by the local St.Peter's Church and showed a king and queen on thrones. I had it on good authority that the queen was depicted by well-known Johanna Cole (nee Mucha). I wish I could have found out further details but the Fort William Daily Times-Journal only listed the basics for the non-British floats. In searching the public library's Gateway to Northwestern Ontario photo archives I discovered that they also had photos from this parade but they were listed among the "mystery photos" as they had received no details at all about them when they were donated. Well, my Nancy Drew genes kicked in and soon I was comparing street scenes to current-day scenes, spending hours on the microfilm readers and sending off notes about floats, dates and street names I was able to identify for the Library's photos.
Anyone can view these interesting photographs from Thunder Bay's past (and area too). Perhaps one of you reading this column today will have a look at one of the mystery photos and spot something or someone you recognize and be able to add to the collective wealth of the database. I have decided to donate prints of my grandfather's parade photos to the Library to be added to their local history photos. His candid shots from the perspective of the parade watchers will be a nice complement to the professional photographer's photos which originally graced the newspaper in a special commemorative coronation issue. And because I found the date of the parade I now know the date of the other photos. Are you sitting on knowledge about this parade that you'd like to share with the Library Detectives? Did you realize how helpful the Library could be for tracking down information for your family tree or any aspect of local history? I have only mentioned one little aspect of how I recently benefited from my Library. Visit the Brodie branch and you will be amazed at what (and who) you will find among our wonderful local history and genealogical resources.
Written by Angela Meady
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