Capturing Life’s Big Events for Posterity

Throughout my adult life, I've owned framed originals of my parents’ wedding portraits. The portraits were done in a photography studio, and I could not recall ever seeing any other photographs of the wedding day. They were married during World War II and cameras were not common, I assumed the studio portraits were the only visual record of the event. 

When I began my genealogy journey, I found their original marriage license in a box, and later I acquired a scan of their marriage registration from an online archive. 

I also had the story of why they married when they did, which was 11 February 1942. The timing was because the Canadian Navy had posted my father to the maritimes. Since 1939, he had been stationed in Victoria (HMCS Naden in Esquimalt) and could come home on leave to Vancouver, where my mother lived. But that was changing and they decided to marry so she could accompany him. 

The portraits, documents and story, built a basic, but satisfactory, record of the wedding for me. The visual records were attached to my family tree and forgotten.

A few years into my research, I purchased a subscription to Newspapers.com and began searching for anything related to my family. I immediately discovered newspaper announcements about my parents' wedding. These newspapers listed the church where the ceremony took place along with the location of the reception and even a description of the bridal gown. 

With those clippings, the record of this life event was growing. 

Then when I created my family archive (see previous post), I sorted through every photograph I had inherited from my parents. I used a magnifying glass to view the images, which was especially helpful for the small prints that were common back in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Imagine my surprise and delight when in amongst those miniature images I found what appeared to be my mother in a wedding gown on my father’s arm walking up the aisle in a church. A high-resolution scan showed full details including other members of the wedding party in the background. 

If there was one of these photographs, could there be more? What began as a review of photographs turned into a dedicated treasure hunt. Buried amongst snapshots of my parents and friends during the war years were three more images from the wedding day. 

I also realized that an 8x10 glossy photograph of my parents and friends in a nightclub had, in fact, been taken the same day as the wedding. Apparently the bridal party had gone out on the town after the official reception held at my grandmother’s home. Photographers frequented nightclubs during that period, taking pictures of partiers who could purchase prints later. On the back of that particular print was a photographer’s form with signatures from all those at the table with a very faint stamp showing the date as 11 February 1942. 

This was the point when I realized I had more than a 'satisfactory' record of the wedding. I had enough visuals and narrative to create a memorial to the event. Research allowed me to put the wedding day in context with weather, war news, images of the church and house where the reception took place. 

I combined it all with other photographs of my parents and a story. The resulting 16-page booklet was printed by a generous cousin who works at a print shop. Distributed in time for Christmas, we now have a memorial to that special day.