The Curious Case of the Canadian Album

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Man on crutches with man’s best friend atop an inverted milk can.

Perhaps there is just the tiniest chance that a reader somewhere in North America might help solve this mystery. Somehow, a beautifully assembled album of photographs of what appears to be a farm in Canada has ended up in North Wales.

The current owner of this rather tatty old album is Mike Jones of Ruthin, North Wales. Mike is fascinated by steam power, and he is also the proud owner of a 1915 Marshall Steam Tractor. He spotted the old album while browsing the shelves of his local second-hand shop. Amongst the photographs, he was amazed to see one of a tractor similar to his own. The album was on sale for £10 ($16), which was quite enough money for a scruffy old photograph album, but all the same Mike was fascinated, so he paid up and took the book home.

After owning it for a few years now, he told me that he can’t help feeling that it would be nice to reunite the book with the appropriate family. If there was any way of finding out where these photographs were taken, and who the people featured in them were, he would be happy to hand the album over.

Of course it’s all a long shot. There may be no surviving relatives for a start, and even if there were surviving relatives, chance of them seeing this item is slight. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so, if you recognize any of the people or places in the photos in the Image Gallery please let me know.