Facebook gets lots of well deserved criticism. But at the end of last year I used it twice to make connections with strangers that brought me instant joy and surprising satisfaction. Here are the stories.

Petit-de-Grat 

In 1969 I had a summer job at Fortress Louisburg. Many seasonal staff were housed in a bunkhouse complex in the woods a few kilometers from the site. I shared space with engineering students, a graphic designer, an historian, another archaeologist and a bilingual interpreter who came from an Acadian community down the shore.

As we got to know each other we learned that the interpreter was going to get married at the end of the summer to another interpreter, who was housed on the other side of town with other women seasonal staff. As the wedding day approached some of us got invited to attend. We drove down for the day in my little VW beetle to tiny Petit-de-Grat on Isle Madame for the ceremony.

The only reason I remember any of this is because I took two photos of the happy couple (I even forgot their names) leaving the church. In 1969 a roll of slide film could stay in your camera for some time and this one was not developed until the next year. By then we had all gone our own ways and the photos languished for the next 56 years.

One Sunday evening in November I came upon the photos and realized Facebook could help identify these people. I quickly found that the Cape Breton Welcome Network had an Isle Madame Facebook and posted the photos asking if that couple looked familiar. Almost immediately there was a “Wow, what nice pictures of Roy and Terry Boudreau.” And then a flurry of people confirmed the identification.

By the end of the evening there were messages from the three daughters of Roy and Terry. One message was particularly heartwarming: “This is so precious, especially today, the timing couldn’t be more special as today would have been [Roy’s] 77th birthday. What a gift this is to our whole family, thank you thank you thank you.” Turned out that Roy had died in 2001.

The next day I messaged a daughter to see where I could send the original slides. She teaches in the same high school as her father. “You created quite the stir in our little town! . . .Your post was the talk of the school today. We all thought it was so lovely!”

Could that be Minneapolis?

For decades we have had a little watercolour painting of an unknown brick building in a snowy urban landscape. We don’t actually remember how we got it (antiquarian book fair in the 1980s?) It is clearly signed S. Lequn.

Last spring I searched and found a likely candidate, Stanley Legun (1914-1966), a graphic designer in Minneapolis. His claim to fame was illustrating a popular cookbook published in 1948: Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans. It now has gone through 25 editions.

Emboldened by my success with the wedding photos I decided to crowd source the painting identification. I posted it on an “historic Minneapolis” Facebook and asked if the scene looked familiar and if S. Lequn was known in those parts.

The first responses were not encouraging but people were looking closely: “Is that the Eiffel Tower in the background?” “It rarely snows in Paris so I’m thinking it’s not the Eiffel Tower.” “I think it is a church steeple.”

But quickly folks started to zero in on the University of Minnesota campus and buildings in a large medical complex. By the evening it was clear that we were looking at the end of Millard Hall, built in 1912 for medical research and demolished in 1999.

Millard Hall c1920. University of Minnesota Archives.

The radio tower was on the Electrical Engineering Building (1924).

The yellow blur was a trolley on Washington Ave.

Other folks searched for Stanley and found where he had lived over time; someone posted a picture of their copy of Treasured Polish Recipes.

The photos that helped confirm the identification were in the collection of the University of Minnesota Archives so I sent off an email to the archivist offering to donate the painting. An immediate response came back that, yes, they would like it.

I thanked the community that had so quickly and effectively answered my questions and commented that this had been Facebook at its best. Someone responded, “Yes, this IS Facebook at its best-digging, connecting, correcting. Thank you for pointing that out; and for taking the time to search, and for sending the painting back home. This really is a win, win, win. The whole thing makes me very happy.”

Makes me very happy too.

Postscript

• Minneapolis was a blank slate to me before my painting identification adventure. A month later, when our news is flooded with horrific scenes of Minneapolis in the snow the location of the painting took on new meaning for me. Today I would not ask the folks in the City of Lakes to waste their community action energy on my trivial questions.
• Sheila and I are still perplexed by how the painting came into our life and why we totally forgot about it when it was out of sight. The acquisition must have been frictionless (inexpensive and without a lot of thought). I did have a particular admiration for the rendering of the strange penthouse on Millard Hall

• While the Facebook search for the building was focusing on the U of M campus a couple of people positively identified it as Slocum Hall at the University of Syracuse. Turns out these folks had used the AI of Google Lens to reach that conclusion. Slocum clearly did not have the distinctive roofline of the building in the painting. AI fails again, hope it has learned something.
• Early in the last century hundreds of very similar neoclassical revival, brick buildings were built on university campuses across North America. In Halifax the Dalhousie School of Architecture Building on Spring Garden Road is an example of this style, built in 1909 just three years before Millard Hall in Minneapolis.

Photo 1977

• When I learned, that after all these years, I had posted the wedding pictures on Roy’s birthday it did make me pause. We live in a world of mysteries.