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Is this your photo album?: Kelowna man looking for owners

Ray Snitynsky said he found the photo album by Sammy J’s in West Kelowna

A Kelowna man is looking for the owners of a 66-year-old photo album.

In October of last year, Ray Snitynsky said he found the non-descript album on the sidewalk in front of Sammy J’s in West Kelowna. He figured it must’ve fallen out of a box or a vehicle when the owners were moving.

Snitynsky said he brought the album to the restaurant, thinking the owners may come back and look for it there. After a week, he came back and took the album to other nearby businesses, each time thinking that the owners would turn up looking for it.

Each time, he left the album at the business for a couple of weeks. Each time, no one claimed it.

“In each case, I retrieved it because I didn’t want it to end up in the dumpster,” he said.

“I’ve now taken it to a number of businesses and I’ve also taken it to the RCMP. They couldn’t locate any of the license plates (pictured in the album) because they date back to 1955.”

Additionally, police told Snitynsky the plates weren’t even from B.C., but they didn’t know if they were from another province or even from another country.

Snitynsky said he also tried to see if any of the photographs had inscriptions but the only information he consistently got were the dates the photos were taken.

His next clue was the subjects themselves.

“It’s got terrific pictures of folks from the Sikh community.”

“So I did reach out to the local Sikh community and also a number of people, including (city councillor) Mohini Singh,” he said.

But he said that the local Sikh community didn’t know who the people in the photos were or where the photos were taken.

Snitynsky’s wife, a member of the Kelowna Genealogical Society, couldn’t place the family, but urged him to keep looking for the album’s owner.

“She does a lot of research with ancestry… and she would hate to see this type of history end up in a dumpster,” he said.

The couple reached out to the Sikh community in the Lower Mainland, sharing the photos in the hopes that there are more people who might be able to point them to the album’s owners.

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Twila Amato
Video journalist, Black Press Okanagan
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Twila Amato

About the Author: Twila Amato

Twila was a radio reporter based in northern Vancouver Island. She won the Jack Webster Student Journalism Award while at BCIT and received a degree in ancient and modern Greek history from McGill University.
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