Digitizing parts of the West End’s rich history

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This article was published 13/04/2022 (1329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WEST END

For Christian Cassidy, making history is a community affair. When he speaks about the people who built Winnipeg, he doesn’t mean politicians passing legislation or wealthy folk fronting cash for projects. He means “the people that actually swung the sledgehammers and drove the street cars and ran the corner stores.”

“Those are the people who really built the city, and those are the people that, sadly, you won’t read about in history books,” Cassidy said.

To capture bits and pieces of these ordinary people’s lives, Cassidy is spearheading the West Central Digital History Project through his work at the Daniel MacIntyre/St. Matthews Community Association, in partnership with the Manitoba Historical Society.

The project seeks to collect and digitize all sorts of historical documents relating to the central area of the West End.

“What we’re trying to do is crowdsource an online history project, where people submit family photos or old calendars from businesses or old church bulletins,” he said.

He said he’s looking for just about anything that can illuminate the day-to-day life of people in the area, all the way up to the year 1980.

“The reason why we stretched it to 1980 — and we still want stuff from a century ago — but we also want stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s, when there was a huge change in the neighbourhood. A lot of Indigenous people were moving in from reserves and urbanizing … Those were also the years that the first waves of Filipino immigrants started coming,” he said.

Cassidy noted he’s not asking for people to hand over their family photos or whatever they bring in, but just to scan a digital copy and provide permission to post it as part of the project online.

People can stop in at the Daniel MacIntyre/St. Matthews Community Association to scan their photos and documents.

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… to understand our neighbourhood, you need to tell those stories.

Cassidy said he’s already encountered some fascinating things.

One woman, while renovating the fireplace in her Sherbrook Street home, discovered a sort of time capsule that she brought to him to document. Inside the capsule was a bundle of photos, postcards, birds of North America cards that used to be put in cigarette packages, meat draw tickets from St. Edward’s church, and a miscellany of other little things from the 1920s.

The woman has since put the capsule back, with a few additions of her own, for someone else to discover down the line.

He’s also made his own contributions to the project, adding his own photos from Telesky Taxidermy on Arlington Street, the owner of which allowed Cassidy to come take photos of the place before it shut down last year.

It’s these sorts of intimate looks into the lives of people in the past that puts our modern society in perspective, Cassidy said.

“To understand our society, to understand our neighbourhood, you need to tell those stories,” he said.

More information can be found through Cassidy’s blog at westenddumplings.blogspot.com or by emailing him at christian@mhs.mb.ca