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February 21, 2011

A tough act to follow

Posted by Amanda Hill under children, Deseronto Public School, Deseronto Town Council, events
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Last year’s family heritage competition, run by the Archives Board in conjunction with the staff and students of Deseronto Public School was such a great success that it didn’t seem possible that 2011’s competition could be as good.

Prize-giving

But it was! Thanks to all the children who entered – it was very difficult to judge, but Board members Reverend Betts and Sharon Sharpe chose four winners from the entries we received. Congratulations to Gabe Cook, Stevi Menard, Jakob Howald and Britney Wotherspoon.

The prizes were presented in the new Community Hall of the Deseronto Recreation Centre by Deputy Mayor, Clarence Zieman and Archives Board Chair, Paul Robertson, following on from a great show by magician Nigel Harrison, who escaped from a straight jacket immediately beforehand. Another tough act to follow!

Magician Nigel Harrison

All the entries received this year will be on display in Deseronto Public Library for the next week or two: please drop by and see the excellent standard of work by the children.

 

February 15, 2011

Heritage Day in Deseronto

Posted by Amanda Hill under Deseronto Public School, Deseronto Town Council, events
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At a meeting of the Council of the Town of Deseronto of February 8th, 2011, the following proclamation was made:

WHEREAS, the Heritage Canada Foundation has long promoted the recognition of the third Monday in February each year as Heritage Day as an opportunity to celebrate Canada’s rich heritage of collections, architecture, parks, and historic places; and

WHEREAS, Heritage Day is a time to reflect on the achievements of past generations and to accept responsibility for protecting our heritage; and

WHEREAS, our citizens should be encouraged to celebrate Deseronto’s uniqueness and to rejoice in their heritage and environment; and

WHEREAS, for many years the Town of Deseronto Archives has collected, preserved, and interpreted the town’s heritage documentary and photographic resources for the benefit of the town’s residents. The Archives sponsors an annual Heritage Day prize to encourage students to learn about and celebrate that heritage through special research projects; and

THEREFORE, I, Norm Clark, Mayor of the Town of Deseronto, do hereby proclaim 21 February 2011 as Heritage Day in the Town of Deseronto, and call upon all citizens to celebrate the richness of our past and the promise of our future.

As part of Heritage Day, the Archives Board will be presenting prizes to members of Deseronto Public School who have entered the annual Heritage Day competition. Prizes will be awarded on Heritage Day at 3pm in the Deseronto Community Recreation Centre at 51 Mechanic Street.

2011 Heritage Day competition entries

Thanks very much to the Archives Board members who have helped to promote this competition and the Heritage Day proclamation in Deseronto.

 

January 19, 2011

Green marketing

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1900s, featured item
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We’ve been packaging up some of the artefacts that the Archives has inherited over the years. This little medicine bottle caught my eye, because of its slogan, which seems ahead of its time:

Omega Oil, It's Green

The appeal of this particular snake oil was its greenness, apparently. A bit of Internet digging surfaced a wonderful website called The Quack Doctor, which has a fascinating article all about Omega Oil, featuring advertisements for the product (it was good for corset pains, for example) and some of its history. Well worth a read!

 

January 12, 2011

1940s Deseronto

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1940s, businesses, featured item, maps
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Detail of 2011.03

One of the Archives’ first new accessions of 2011 was a map of Hastings County, transferred by colleagues at the Lennox and Addington County Museum and Archives. Surrounding the map are mini-business directories for Belleville, Deseronto, Frankford, Madoc, Shannonville, Stirling and Tweed. The photo shows the businesses listed for Deseronto, which suggest that the map dates from the 1940s (as that was when Evan Gardner’s funeral home was in operation). It must have been much simpler to remember telephone numbers, back then…

Ed Roach’s butcher shop is fondly remembered by many local people. One of our oral history interviewees remarked that Ed always promised that his meat was “as tender as a woman’s heart”.

 

December 23, 2010

Oh what fun…

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1900s, About Deseronto, featured item, people, photographs
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Cole family sleigh-ride - 2010.27 (7a)

This festive photo was one of a small collection recently donated to the Archives by Bev Boomhour. It shows members of the Cole family on a sleigh ride. Bev remembers the sleigh, but doesn’t think she ever rode in it herself.

We’d like to take this end-of-the-year opportunity to thank all our donors for bringing or sending their historic materials into the Archives. We’ve had over thirty donations of photographs and other items this year. A particular vote of thanks goes to those people who gave their time and memories to the oral history component of our ‘About Deseronto’ project this year.

We’re still looking for more memories (and photos) of living, working and growing up in the town, so if you are willing to share them, please head over to the About Deseronto site and let us know what Deseronto means to you!

 

December 15, 2010

Ho, ho, ho?

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1990s, art, featured item, newspapers
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This festive cartoon came in today in a file of tourism-related flyers and correspondence from Deseronto’s Town Hall. It dates from late 1993 and is possibly from one of the Napanee newspapers. It’s rather puzzling though: does anyone know what had been celebrated a day earlier in Deseronto that year, to trigger this?

UPDATE: Halloween fell on a Sunday in 1993, prompting discussion about celebrating it on the Saturday. Thanks to Gail and Dana for solving that mystery!

 

November 12, 2010

Using the new to share the old

Posted by Amanda Hill under archives, Archives 2.0, events
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It’s ‘Follow an Archive’ day today, where everyone is being encouraged to discover more about history and archives through the online updating service, Twitter. Twitter is a great way of finding out what’s happening in all sorts of areas of interest: ranging from breaking news via long-established media organisations to information about local events and activities.

In Ontario, there are now quite a few archives who are talking (tweeting) about their activities and their wonderful collections on Twitter. You can receive updates from the Archives of Ontario, Dundas Museum and Archives, the Cobourg and District Historical Society, Port Hope Archives, Appleby College Archives and Elgin County Archives (and, of course, Deseronto Archives!).  The organizers of this event have compiled a directory of tweeting archives all around the world.

On Twitter, the #followanarchive tag will be used to share information about what archives are doing on Twitter to bring their treasures to a whole new audience.

 

September 22, 2010

A true journalist

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1930s, aircraft, family history
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Deseronto resident Johanna Gordanier visited the Archives today, looking for information on her uncle, Jos van Langen. He was a Dutchman who died in a plane crash in Europe in the 1930s. A little rooting around brought up a Dutch site on plane crashes and a page about the accident. The page is in Dutch, but Google’s translation service did a good job of converting the page into English.

Jos van Langan was an editor for the Dutch newspaper De Tijd. He was on his way home to Amsterdam from Milan, on a flight that would cross the Alps before stopping in Frankfurt. The aircraft, a KLM DC-2, ran into bad weather as it entered Switzerland, flying at an altitude of 5000 metres. Rather chillingly, van Langen recorded the last moments of the flight in his journal. You can see the readings of the altimeter, as the plane descended:

 

Jos van Langen's notebook

 

The pilot attempted a crash landing, but the plane landed awkwardly and the main fuselage was completely destroyed, killing all on board.

The notebook itself is now in the archive of the Press Museum in Amsterdam.

Another passenger killed on this flight was the English artist Arthur Watts. Examples of posters he produced for the London Underground can be seen at the London Transport Museum.

One of Watt’s illustrations featured a plane crash:

 

Flown the Atlantic have ye? Then supposin' you catch my cows and tell them about it!

 

This image (recovered from the Internet Archive) was originally on a website maintained by members of Arthur Watts’s family.

 

September 1, 2010

Digitization day coming up!

Posted by Amanda Hill under About Deseronto, events, photographs
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United Church, Deseronto

The archivist paid a visit to the United Church in Deseronto today, so that she could encourage the members of the Deseronto Diner’s Club to take part in the ‘About Deseronto‘ project. We’re hoping that people in and around the town will share their memories, photographs and objects with us, so that we can, in turn, share them with the wider world through the About Deseronto website.

We are also taking part in a Community Digitization Project which is being led by the Prince Edward County Archives in Wellington. We are organizing a Digitization Day in Deseronto Public Library on September 15th. We are hoping that people will bring in their old photographs of the town, or of their families for us to scan and add to the online information we already hold about Deseronto and the surrounding areas. We are also able to photograph any interesting historic objects that might be lurking in corners of people’s houses.

We hope to see you at the Library on the 15th!

 

August 5, 2010

Library censorship, 1898

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1890s, Deseronto Public Library
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As part of our series commemorating the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Deseronto Public Library, we highlight an item in the minutes of the Library Board’s meeting held on December 13, 1898:

1892 edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The question of refusal on part of the Librarian to issue certain books to various individuals was raised by the Secretary who took the ground that we should not have books in the Library at all about which there was any reasonable doubt. Several books were named among which were the following:-

The Lady of Quality [‘A Lady of Quality’ by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1896]
Maggie [by Stephen Crane, 1893]
Tess of Duberville [‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ by Thomas Hardy, 1891]
On the Sunny Shore [by Henryk Sienkiewicz, 1897]

It was moved by Mr. Costigan, seconded by Mr. Copland that we expunge these books entirely.

The Librarian was instructed that outside of these books he was hereafter to refuse no person provided the books desired were in the Library.

An interesting approach to the problem! All of these once-controversial books are now freely available on the Internet, so you can see why they were considered to be inappropriate reading for some of the town’s residents by following the links on the titles to the Open Library.

 

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