Editor’s Note: The wbowe.com website was initially constructed during the Covid-19 virus pandemic that hit in early 2020. My goal was to digitally follow in my mother Mary Gwinn Bowe‘s analog footsteps. She had begun to catalog the extended Canavan family in her 1970 genealogy work The Families. I set out to to update and expand her work and use the technology available since it was published. My idea was to make the result widely accessible on the internet in hopes that it might become a useful and sustainable resource for the wider family.

By Thanksgiving 2021, the first anniversary of the website’s launch, more than 40,000 family pictures and videos of the extended Canavan family had been collected, organized and uploaded for viewing. With this early effort complete, I wanted to take advantage of the website’s infrastructure in a secondary manner. Creation of the People, Places and Things photo galleries lets the site also serve as a home for some of the non-family photographs I have taken over the years. This separate Photo Archive was my solution to finding a subordinate but accessible home for these non-family odds and ends.

In the case of the People galleries, with no particular organizational scheme in mind, I began to assemble a few galleries of individuals whose pictures I had taken in my school, Army and working life or in my leisure time. As this effort evolved, it turned out some individuals selected were close friends, and some were more distant acquaintences; some were living and some were dead. Though the selection process for my subjects may have been haphazard, all chosen have in common that I hold them or their memory in high regard.