Lethbridge Historical Society seeks help identifying photos

The president of the Lethbridge Historical Society is putting out a call to southern Albertans this Black History Month.

“I might have stories but I can’t find pictures,” Belinda Crowson said Monday.

She says one of the biggest obstacles in telling Black stories from the region is a lack of photos. 

Such is the case with William “Bill” Brown, who was a bronc rider in the 1920s and ’30s and left Lethbridge with his family after neighbours wrote letters in the newspaper expressing disgust with his marriage to a white woman.

“You can understand with that sort of discrimination in the community why the Brown family left,” Crowson said. “Based on oral history, they moved to Calgary but we have no idea if they stayed in Calgary or moved on from there.”

Crowson says she would love to find photos or more details about the Brown family.

“It’s one of those things where we’ll keep digging away and looking at everything but if anybody has time to help us with some of the research, we’re always looking for help,” she said.

She says currently, they also have the opposite problem: photos with no context and no names.

She says they’ve had success in the past by posting unidentified photos.

“There was a picture from a 1912 Fort Macleod band,” Crowson said. “There was a Black man playing a trombone in the front of the picture. Thanks to the research of the family, which we discovered online, we were able to identify him.”

That Fort Macleod man was Samual Daniel Watts — one of only a few Black Canadians who served during the First World War.

They discovered that he was killed in the line of duty after taking the place of a young soldier on the front lines.

“It’s piece by piece,” Crowson said. “It’s slow work, but the more people we can identify, through stories and through pictures, the better our entire history is and the more complete our story is.”

Crowson says the society’s hopes that more people will recognize family members and friends in these old photos and help piece together history.