Marion Baker (right) looking over 13 long-lost reels of film formerly owned by her parents and now returned by a Nanaimo family. (Ian Holmes/NanaimoNewsNOW)

By Ian Holmes

history restored

VIDEO: Historic family video tapes missing for 45 years returned to Cedar woman

May 14, 2020 | 1:04 PM

NANAIMO — The power of social media helped a Nanaimo mother-son duo return invaluable video tapes to family members who assumed they’d never see them again.

Chris Wallinger and his mother Wendy Robinson gave a collection of films to Marion Baker during an emotionally-charged exchange in Nanaimo on Wednesday, May 13.

Baker lives in Cedar and is one of five daughters of ‘F Thompson,’ the name which identified several of the 13 neatly marked tapes of the Victoria family dating back to the 1960’s.

The Super 8 films detailing Christmas gatherings, vacations, weddings and other family memories were likely mistakenly shipped off to a garage sale instead of storage when her parents downsized in 1975, Baker said.

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“They must have got the wrong box or got mixed in the wrong pile and that was the end of it.”

She said it’s heart-warming people care enough to go through the trouble of finding who the tapes belonged to.

“History to our family means a lot. We’re huge on reunions and big occasions and something like this is just incredible, to me it’s incredible we have the chance to re-live all this stuff.”

Baker plans to digitize the films and share the historic footage with her sisters and other relatives.

The swap came together after Wallinger used his free time during the COVID-19 pandemic to finally solve the riddle of whose tapes his mother owned.

They were first bought at a Kelowna yard sale by his grandmother roughly 10 years ago.

“My mom brought them home with her to Victoria from Kelowna and I think they just got kind of lost in the shuffle, thrown in the box and forgotten about until now,” Wallinger said.

His efforts to find the rightful owner of the tapes quickly gained traction in a Victoria Facebook page.

“I posted at 1:30 p.m., by 7 p.m. I was talking to two of the daughters of the deceased parents who filmed these original family tapes.”

It’s unknown where these Thompson family tapes were between 1975 and 2010 when they were purchased at a Kelowna yard sale. (submitted/Chris Wallinger)

The quick turnaround was made possible by Victoria-based geneology and family history hobbyist Taryn Jones.

She said the search could have been fruitless since Thompson is a common last name.

“Because (Wallinger) had the addresses of the Thompsons I went and looked at electoral registers at ancestry.com and when I found that the names matched exactly, it was really satisfying,” Jones said.

Another favourable break occurred when Jones provided Wallinger with contact information of a Thompson family relative in Winnipeg. He just happens to have a strong interest in family history himself.

The man supplied Wallinger with phone numbers for one of the Thompson daughters who lives in Vernon and the rest is history.

Jones said this series of events highlights how social media is helping more people connect with their past.

“Just the sheer number of people involved in the Facebook pages and social media, you just have a much better chance of coming across somebody who knows something or can help you find the information you need.”

A great irony of the situation is Robinson’s mother is huge into genealogy.

“She was the president of the genealogy society in Kelowna so that’s why she would never, ever throw anything like that away,” Robinson said.

ian@nanaimonewsnow.com
On Twitter: @reporterholmes