Volunteers at a non-profit bookstore in Alberta recently found a mysterious album full of antique photos in their pile of donations.
The Shava Bookstore volunteers knew they had to get the priceless heirloom back to its rightful owner, but they didn’t know who had dropped it off.
The album was filled with pages and pages of black-and-white headshots of people dressed in formal attire that appear to be from the 1800s. But who were they?
Their first clue was a book that came in the same grocery store bag as the album. It was entitled Prairie Progress and is all about the Macrorie District in Saskatchewan.
Two of the photos were signed with the name Bonitz, which also appeared in the book.
After the local St. Albert newspaper printed a story about their find, they started getting phone calls from Saskatchewan and B.C.
One of the calls was from Julie Russell, who said they belonged to her brother-in-law Max Bonitz, who was born in 1919 and died in Edmonton in 2007.
The family photos are mostly of Bonitz’s relatives, who came from Germany and Holland and settled in Saskatchewan.
Russell picked up the album and book, which she said were discarded by mistake, and now she plans to send them to Bonitz’s daughter in Vancouver.
With a report from CTV Edmonton
