Group needs help identifying photos
Can you put a name to any of these faces?
Agroup trying to identify people in thousands of old black-and-white photos is having a display in Levin Mall next week.
The photos were taken by photographers and journalists who worked for Horowhenua Chronicle, and were saved and stored in boxes by journalist Bob Malcomson, who worked for the paper since 1946.
Malcolmson died in 2002, aged 80, and the boxes were donated to Te Takeretanga o Kura-hau-po¯ Levin Library. Very few photos had names or dates attached.
There they remained, until a dedicated group of volunteers headed by Gloy Deadman began the task of putting names to faces. There were 11 cardboard boxes, each containing almost 1000 photos.
For the past five months a dedicated group from the Horowhenua Family History Group had met each Friday in the archive room of the library. It was a case of the more learned eyes the better, and every so often someone is able to put a name to a face.
The group had managed to go through thousands of photographs, scouring through old papers if a photo had a date on the back. While they had managed to identified a large amount of people, there were still thousands of photos of people yet to be identified.
Mrs Deadman said they had been through all the boxes now and needed help from the public. Being local photos, it might be that local people or family members are able to recognise people in the pics.
The stall will be in the Levin Mall on Tuesday, March 26, between 10am and 2pm.
“It’s super day so hopefully there will be plenty of people about,” she said. “We’re getting
down to the boxes of photographs where we don’t have any club as there is no context, no year or time.”
Some of the photographs were of newborn babies or wedded couples.
Mrs Deadman and her late husband Ian moved to Levin from Dannevirke with their three children in 1966. She was a school teacher and worked for many years at Taitoko Primary School until retirement. She took up the job of looking at the Bob Malcolmson collection following the recent death of her husband. She had experience researching genealogy for more than half a century and was a long serving member of the Horowhenua Historical Society.