Drummers in red uniforms, Canadian mounties and the Queen of the Snows march across the screen in a 12-minute silent film of the St. Paul Winter Carnival King Boreas Grande Day Parade.

Nancy Tschida points to her Aunt Florence as a young woman watching floats pass in the 8 mm film. Tschida doesn’t know what year it’s from, but she knows where to find the answer.

Her aunt, Florence Tschida of St. Paul, died in October — and with her any secrets the silent film holds.

For the past month, Tschida, of Maplewood, has been going to the George Latimer Central Library in downtown St. Paul and flipping through the yellowing pages of Winter Carnival scrapbooks. The books are part of a unique archive in the St. Paul room on the library’s second floor that documents much of the city’s history.

Tschida estimates she’s put 15 to 20 hours into the research, poring over microfiche and scrapbooks.

She’s trying to figure out what year her aunt’s silent film was made. She recently made a discovery that complicates her efforts: the video may be three years of Winter Carnival footage spliced together.

Tschida wants to give the film to the Minnesota Historical Society — that’s why it’s so important she gets the date right, she said.

And as someone who has 40 binders of personal genealogy research in her living room, she finds the research enjoyable.

“I just like reading the old papers, too. It’s not work for me; it’s fun,” Tschida said.

She thinks a young Johnny Carson and the St. Paul Dispatch “Wizard of Oz” float hold the key to the mystery, but nearly all of the Pioneer Press archives are off site being digitized, so she turned to the St. Paul library.

 

A SPECIAL COLLECTION

The scrapbooks Tschida combs through are part of the library’s collection of St. Paul history. They range from high school yearbooks and city council records dating to 1886 to what librarians say is the most popular collection: the Winter Carnival.

The St. Paul Collection fills a climate-controlled room with 24 linear feet of material.

Library staff have compiled Winter Carnival scrapbooks — with chunks of years missing — from 1937 to 2014.

The Winter Carnival collection also boasts newspaper and magazine clippings, cards with miscellaneous Winter Carnival facts and books about the 10-day festival.

One box holds photos, postcards, programs, Winter Carnival buttons and special sections from the Pioneer Press.

People sign up to use the locked room year-round for genealogy and other research. But the library sees an uptick in sign-ups during the Winter Carnival, said Barbara Malas, the librarian in charge of the St. Paul Collection for the past five years.

Librarians admit the collection isn’t complete or perfect. They have struggled to digitize and preserve the material.

“The smell of vinegar is very strong in the corner of the room. It’s the acid destroying the paper,” librarian Ron Paulson said of aging newspaper clippings.

The librarians have scanned everything in the room from before 1923 and are trying to figure out how to put it online, he said.

Paulson recently met with the library’s director of digital services and hopes to have digital archives from before 1923 up and running in the next few months, he said.

“The idea is to digitize this and put it online and make it available for the citizens of St. Paul — and for that matter anyone throughout the world — to come and look at the articles and the pictures and other things we have,” Paulson said.

 

MYSTERY SOLVED

After nearly 20 hours of research in the St. Paul Room, Tschida found what she’s looking for. On Thursday, she opened the first page of the 1956 scrapbook to a picture of former television talk-show host Johnny Carson in the parade. She said a man who looked like Carson is seen riding in a convertible in her aunt’s film. She was also able to identify the St. Paul Dispatch Wizard of Oz float in the 1955 scrapbook.

Tschida first watched the silent film with her aunt before she died. She said her Aunt Florence smiled the whole time.

Even though her aunt died recently, this connection to her doesn’t make Tschida sad.

“It’s more of a tribute to her than being sad about it,” Tschida said.

Katie Kather can be reached at 651-228-5006. Follow her at twitter.com/ktkather.

Copyright 2015 Pioneer Press.