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June 24, 2009

First view of television

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1940s, featured item, people
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Have had my first view of television and believe me, it is even more thrilling than the anticipation, which was considerable…

What solid comfort to sit at ease and watch news flashes, right up to the second, travelogues, wedding of an English Earl, dancers, comedians, plays, and even a professional boxing match. Certainly something to please varied tastes and yet video is still in its infancy!…

The radio did much towards educating people and bringing near the far-off places. Now one will be able to travel by television; see the wonders of the world without the colossal expense and time usually involved in actual participation. Certainly a marvellous age in which to be living!

So wrote Florrie Sexsmith, a Deseronto resident, in her weekly ‘Food Fancies’ column in the Deseronto Post newspaper. This particular column was published on October 12, 1949. A compilation of Florrie’s columns has recently been donated to the archives (Accession 2009.24).

 

April 15, 2009

A boy named Florence

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1870s, businesses, featured item, people
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The earliest minutes for the town council of Deseronto (in the days when it was known as Mill Point) show the names of the Reeve and four town councillors. One of the names is that of Florence Donoghue, which was intriguing, as it seemed highly unlikely that a woman could have been a councillor in 1872. The mystery was soon cleared up, as later minutes in the same volume referred to this councillor as “Mr. Donoghue”.

A check on the 1901 census shows Florence Donoghue as a male who was born on 28 January 1832. Directories of the time show Donoghue and Bro. as dry goods merchants on the south side of Main Street, at its junction with Prince Street. Donoghue and his partner, James Oliver, were still in business in 1911, when Donoghue was 79 years of age. The shop would have been one of those in the picture below:


Florence, it transpires, was fairly common as a boy’s name in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. In the 1881 census of Canada there were 64 Florences whose place of birth was Ireland. 24 of those were men. Florence Donoghue was born in Ontario, but (as his name suggests) he is listed as being of Irish descent.

 

November 2, 2008

From our social columnist

Posted by Amanda Hill under events, people
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Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada’s first Prime Minister) made an appearance at the annual banquet of the Hastings County Historical Society on November 1. His presence was explained (according to the Society’s President, Orland French) by the proximity of Sir John A.’s final resting place to the School of Medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston (and the wonders of DNA maniplulation). He and his latest biographer, Richard Gwyn, were the after-dinner speakers at the event, which was raising funds for the relocation of the Hastings County Archives. These records are currently held in less-than-ideal conditions in the former Thurlow Township Hall. The fund-raising target is $1,000,000.

 

August 14, 2008

"Old Time Concert", 1915

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1910s, churches, Flickr, leisure, people
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One of the clever things about putting the Deseronto picture collection online with Flickr is the ability to annotate the photographs. If you go to Flickr by clicking on the image below you will see that each of the cast members of this Methodist Church concert has their name attached to their face in a note.

Anyone with a Flickr account can add to photos in this way (signing up for an account is free), so anybody with additional information about the photographs can annotate them or comment on them within Flickr. You can see an example of this on a photo of a crashed aircraft in the Deseronto Archives collection (although I’m not sure how useful this particular annotation is!). It would be good to get fuller names for some of the married women in this photograph, who are mainly identified by their husbands’ names (e.g. Mrs Walter Scott).

The Methodist Church in Canada merged with the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in 1925 to form the United Church of Canada. The church hall of Deseronto’s United Church was named Stover Hall in honour of Percy Stover and his wife, Gertie (née Snider), who are two of the individuals in this photograph.

 

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