A blast from the past

One of the last things a resident expected to find while renovating her Sundre home was an old photo with local ties that’s estimated to be more than 100 years old.

Kim Free, who is expecting her first child, has recently been working to renovate her home with some help from family.

"We were tearing down the old wood panelling, and my dad was working on it," she said, referring to the room that will become her infant’s nursery.

Her father, Ray Adair, was removing the room’s old built-in closet — a feature Free wasn’t too fond of — and that’s when he stumbled upon the old sepia-toned photo, which was printed on a large cardboard-like stock that makes an 8 by 10 enlargement look almost small in comparison.

"He found that and he just put it aside, and then when I came home from work he was like 'Look what I found, that’s kind of weird!’" she said during an interview at the Round Up’s office.

When she initially laid her eyes on the photo, Free said she was surprised to see how big it is.

I’ve never seen one that size on that type of cardboard. It’s just a really original type of photo. I imagine this would have been expensive to do back in the day," she said, adding most old pictures she has seen tend to be rather small.

She was also quite captivated by the eyes of the people in the photo.

"I feel like I can look in these people’s eyes and know who they are a little bit."

After the initial excitement of the discovery waned, Free wasted no time in starting to search for any relatives who might recognize the family in the photo.

"I posted it on Facebook and there were a million comments."

The find generated some excitement on social media, and many people wanted to be kept in the loop and wished her luck in locating relatives.

Within a couple of days or so, a connection was made.

"That is my great-grandma and -grandpa Jahnke, and their daughter Ada," said Donna Gustaw, from Caroline, adding that Ada is her great-auntie. She also came to the Round Up’s office for the interview at the same time as Free, who gave her the photo.

Frank and Emma Jahnke, the couple pictured in the photo, were married on Feb. 1, 1906. They lived in Iowa, where they had their first three children. Ada, the baby in the picture, was born June 29, 1907. The photo would have been taken around that time. The couple had two more children, Charlie and Frank Wilbur, who would go on to become her grandfather, she said.

"He always went by his middle name, Wilbur."

When Wilbur was three months olds, Frank and Emma moved to Didsbury, where they had another five children, Ethel, Esther, Eva, Fred and Mildred.

Her grandfather, Wilbur, grew up to marry Norah on Feb. 15, 1941.

"They started out in Didsbury and then moved to a farm in the Harmattan area where they raised nine kids: Lorna — my mom — Harold, Helen, Jean, Frank, Pat, Ed, Fred and Louise," she said.

In the ’70s, her grandparents retired and moved into a house on the hill on the east side of Sundre, and from there they eventually moved about 10 years later into a mobile home right in town where the picture was found, she said.

Gustaw’s husband Larry stumbled upon the photo that Free had shared on Facebook, and brought it to her attention.

"When I first saw it I was like 'I don’t know if that’s ours or not, but I’ll take it to my mom and see!’" she said.

After seeing the image, her mother Lorna was able to identify the people pictured as her grandparents, or Gustaw’s great-grandparents.

"It’s really cool," said Gustaw about the photo.

"I’ve been going through old pictures and putting together a scrapbook for my own kids of all this kind of stuff. I don’t know how I’m going to fit it into my scrapbook!"

Gustaw said she was really excited to see the picture and the faces of people she’s related to, and expressed her gratitude to Free for going out of her way to look for relatives.

"That’s awesome," Free said about being able to find through social media a descendant to pass the photo on to.

"Social media is amazing that way," she said, referring to its ability to connect people.

Social media can be used for really harmful things — such as bullying, trolling or venting angry opinions — but finding the old photo and subsequently someone to return it to was such a heart-warming story, she said.