TVA has sent out its holiday fundraising letter in our latest issue of the
Heritage Gazette. As always, our welfare depends on your support through membership, volunteerism and donations. Your help has made Trent Valley Archives one of the most important heritage organizations in the area. We are proud of what we, together, have accomplished. There is still much to do, but we can only do it with your generosity. Click
here to read the full text of the fundraising letter and to find out how you can donate today.
The Peterborough Examiner, in connection with its move to downtown Ashburnham, donated its archives, research library and photographic collections to the Trent Valley Archives. This is the largest donation of archives we have received since accepting the land records of Peterborough County. For more information about this exciting acquisition, click
here.
Xmas Gift Cards Now on Sale - December only!Give the gift of history this Christmas with the Trent Valley Archives Christmas Gift Card. The Trent Valley Archives Gift Card entitles the recipient to free admission to any 3 of our regular, scheduled events, or special events within the 2012 calendar year. Treat your friends and family to an entertaining and historic look at Peterborough with 3 of our popular tours - a more than $50 for just $35. Click
here for more...
Yes - you read it right: TVA has its own YouTube channel featuring videos and slideshows of our various walks and tours. Recently, two new slideshows were added in honour of our Open House and Volunteer / Donor appreciation day. The first is an informational slideshow featuring TVA's various products and services. The second is a slideshow celebrating our volunteers. If you didn't get a chance to see these slideshows at our open house, you can click
here to take a peak!
Trent Valley Archives held an open house and volunteer / donor appreciation event on Saturday, Sept. 17th, 2011. The day started out cold, but the sun soon obliged us making for a pleasant day to gather outdoors to enjoy refreshments and meet with good friends - old and new. Approximately 50 people attended, including members of the local media, taking part in workshops, touring our archival displays, and enjoying some live jazz provided by students from the Prince of Wales stage Band. Click
here for more...
On Wednesday, September 14th, Elwood Jones, Susan Kyle and Guy Thompson made a TVA presentation for the Sisters at Mount St. Joseph in their new building. Ron Briegel attended as our photographer. Our visit was set up by the Mount's activity director, Val Johnson. The theme of our presentation was "The Early Fifties". We focused on the death of King George VI, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Korean War and local issues such as the building of the new Civic Hospital. Click
here for more...
Peterborough's Stormy History: Little Lake Cemetery Twilight Pageant proceeds in spite of rainOn Sunday, August 14th, 2011, dozens of intrepid folks came out to our 2nd annual Twilight Pageant at Little Lake Cemetery and, along with our volunteer actors, braved the rain and winds for a lamplight tour of the cemetery. The weather provided a dramatic backdrop as visitors met and listened to some of Peterborough's famous undead at their very own graves. A good time was had by all in spite of the weather. If you missed us this time, you're in luck! The event will run two more times at the end of October. Click
here for details.
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Ancestry Workshop a Success
On Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2011, about 30 participants took part in the workshop on ancestry hosted by Lesley Anderson of Ancestry.ca. In the morning session, Lesley took us through on-line genealogy basics and gave great hints for searching your ancestors through the many search engines found on ancestry’s website. If that wasn’t enough to fill your mind with ideas about how to get through that stumbling block or hard to find ancestor, the afternoon session was all about creating a family tree and uploading it to ancestry.ca’s website. There it can link with millions of other trees, providing possible “links” to other family trees through a green leaf icon. Lesley also mentioned that Family Tree Maker 2012 which is coming soon, will have a “synch” function that will allow users to make changes to their own family trees while updating their online trees simultaneously – a great time saver if you are working in one program or the other. Rick Roberts, from Global Genealogy will be speaking on this new version of Family Tree Maker in November. Click here for details. Thanks to Lesley for offering her expertise and to everyone who came out. Click here to download a copy of Lesley's workshop notes.
Keith Dinsdale
It is with sadness that we announce that long time TVA volunteer, board member and active supporter Keith Dinsdale has passed away. Visiting will be held at the COMSTOCK FUNERAL HOME & CREMATION CENTRE, 356 Rubidge Street, Peterborough, on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 from 9:00 am to 11:00 am. A celebration of Keith's life will follow, in the Chapel at 11:00 am. Interment at Keene Upper Cemetery to follow. Click here to read more...
June 4th and 5th, 2011: Trent Valley Archives had a booth at Lansdowne Place this weekend to promote our publications and our summer tours. As usual, our spectacular sign drew people in, and there was a lot of interest and activity around the booth. Thanks to the many volunteers who came out to help, and especially to Elwood who spent the whole weekend at the mall - if he hadn't become an historian and archivist, he would have been a natural at sales!
May 28, 2011: TVA participated in the giant Gilmour Street garage sale on Saturday, May 28. In spite of the gloomy weather, crowds were good, and so were sales. The final tally was over $1100! Thanks so much to everyone who helped make this event such a success, from the many people who donated items for the sale, to the tireless volunteers who sorted, priced, loaded, unloaded, haggled, bargained, and cleaned up in the rain. Thanks also to Steve Gavard for bringing everything to the sale and to Dale Standen for letting us use his yard!
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John Graham Weir Diaries Come to Life at TVA Annual General Meeting
The annual general meeting of the Trent Valley Archives was held in the new Highland Park Visitation Centre of the Little Lake Cemetery in the main visitation room, which had built-in facilities for audio-visual presentations.
Prior to the business portion of the AGM, Pat Marchen, ably assisted by Bruce Fitzpatrick, made a splendid presentation on the world of J. G. Weir, an Otonabee township farmer who kept a remarkable diary for his last 45 years, 1880 to 1925. Pat’s visual selections and excerpts from the diary and Bruce, in the persona of J. G. Weir, was dressed in clean farm clothes, an Orange sash, and seated in a comfortable parlour setting (furnished by an antiques dealer). More...
Elwood Jones Receives the 2011 F.H. Dobbin Award
Dr. Jones Recognized by the Peterborough Historical Society for his book Little Lake Cemetery: A Public Trust is a Beautiful Thing
TVA Archivist, Professor Emeritus and prominent local historian, Elwood Jones, was recently honoured with the 2011 F.H. Dobbin Award by the Peterborough Historical Society for his book entitled Little Lake Cemetery, a Public Trust is a Beautiful Thing. The book is the first history of the cemetery to be written in almost a hundred years since F.H. Dobbin’s own history of the cemetery was published in the 1920s. Written for the 160th anniversary of the incorporation of the Little Lake Cemetery Company, the book chronicles the history of Little Lake Cemetery from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. Read more...
A World of Genealogy at Your Fingertips...
Wildcards, diminutive names, phonetical spelling.....these hints and more were some of the tricks Lesley Anderson, a Content Specialist with one of the most recognized genealogy websites around, "Ancestry.ca" shared with a group of more than 90 budding and vetran genealogists on Tuesday April 5th. Lesley, who travels all over Canada to deliver these sessions discussed how part of her job description is to visit archives all the world viewing and collecting fragile archival records to be placed online essentially saving these documents and making them public. Ancestry currently is the best resource when searching Ontario Vital Stats (birth, marriages and deaths), the Canadian Census (1851-1911 are all indexed), as well as border crossings and ship lists. I particularly liked the portion of the seminar when she spoke of how to find that "hidden" ancestor. I'm sure you all know the one I mean! The one that doesn't seem to show up in anything and becomes the one missing link that ties the entire family together. Lesley shared great tips like using middle names, searching for marriages of siblings if you are stuck finding parent's names, using a woman's maiden name, making sure the soundex is turned on and many more! To get the most out of your searching experience try adding a range of dates so you aren't swamped with thousands of "hits" each time. Adjust the front page with all the search tools you need by using the "customize your homepage" button to keep all the genealogy searches handy each time. As well, if you pick the "Search" function on the front page, you will find a world map at the bottom which will tell you what records are available for each country you click on. All helpful hints!
We are very pleased to announce that Lesley will be back in the summer to teach ancestry "hands-on" workshops. These will be limited to a small number of participants as Lesley will be able to assist you one-on-one with your own searching. Thanks to everyone who came out and congrats to those who won copies of Elwood's Historian's Notebook and the copy of ancestry.ca World Deluxe that Lesley surprised one participant with!
Trent Valley Archives looks forward to working with ancestry in the future digitizing some of our more sought-after collections to bring to a global scale. Stay tuned!
The Trent Valley Archives is always on the lookout for new acquisitions and recently we've been inundated! Recent donations include: material from the Weddell family (about 20 cubic feet) relating to three generations of the family that was noted locally for insurance; a delightful montage by Louis Mendel, a local professional photographer, c. 1909, of the Brass Department at the Canadian General Electric works; a box of archival papers acquired for $2 at a local lawn sale (Weller Homewood area) of a family, 1910 to 1950, which includes about 65 letters exchanged between members of the family during World War I (three of the Brown brothers served overseas and kept in touch with the home base in Peterborough); additional papers of Peter Adams, largely relating in this instalment to projects that were discussed in his recent book, Peterborough Successes; and a second instalment of the DeLaval papers - one of the most impressive business collections locally, and one of our most important collections ever.
A separate donation brought us an original wall map that is the birds eye view of Peterborough released in October 1895 (see photo, above). We published a very limited run of this map in 2007, and had a full-sized copy made for our research collection. The original map, handsomely framed, which we just received is in generally good condition for that age. There is some watermarking, and some small tears tied to creases. This copy, however, has an early advertisement for The “Canadian” Canoe Co, showing a bearded canoeist on a pleasant paddle. The copy is pasted over top of the display advertisement for the Peterborough Canoe Company. The original Canadian Canoe Company advertisement remains in place on the right hand side of the map. All the display ads on the 1895 map showed buildings; indeed that is one of the great research strengths of the map. We have left the altered map as is because there is historical research value in the change.
The provenance of the map is revealing. The map was formerly owned by Claude H. Rogers, vice-president of the Canadian Canoe Company, and remained with his house. It seems that the rivalry between the Canadian Canoe Company and the Peterborough Canoe Company was quite serious.
The map is on display in the reading room at the Trent Valley Archives. The attached picture shows the bottom left-hand corner of the map.
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2011 Peterborough Historical Society Annual Heritage Awards
Each year, PHS sponsors Annual Heritage Awards to citizens of the City of Peterborough and Peterborough County as a way of acknowledging significant accomplishments in heritage preservation and promotion. Nominations are currently being accepted in five categories, named in honour of former citizens who made lasting contributions to the community. Click
here for more details .
Nomination forms for the awards are available at the Trent Valley Archives, or click
here to download and print out a nomination form. Deadline for nominations is 7 March 2011.
On Tuesday, January 18th, at the Peterborough Public Library, Peterborough citizens gathered to hear a talk by George A. Cox (as played by local lawyer and archives volunteer Bruce Fitzpatrick) put on by the Peterborough Historical Society. Cox spoke about his years in Peterborough including his time as mayor and his many business successes. Several citizens - such as Cox's one-time lawyer James Dennistoun (played by John Punter of Pig's Ear fame), his Tory opponent in the election of 1875, W.H. Scott (played by Tim Rowat), and local brewer Henry Calcutt (played by Dennis Carter-Edwards) breached decorum to challenge Cox on matters such as his conduct in said election and his stand on temperance.
The evening concluded with the singing of the hymn "What a Friend we Have in Jesus" with accompaniment on French horn and sousaphone by brothers Justin and Mark Hiscox (of 4th Line Theatre fame). Also assisting in the event were Heather Aiton Landry who sewed the temperance banners, Steve Guthrie on video, and Diane Robnik who researched and wrote the script. Thanks also to the Peterborough Museum and Archives for bringing along an oil portrait of George A. Cox found in their collection. A great time was had by all!
New Portable installed on site!
We are pleased to announce that our portable is now in place. This portable will add over 700 square feet of floor space, and allow us to house up to 4,000 cubic feet of records. These are some snapshots of the installation in November. We started earlier in the fall by building a concrete pad for the portable to sit on, and completed the installation just in time to beat the first major snowfall! Thanks to PVNC Catholic District School Board, Camp Kawartha and Trent University for donating the building and to Jim Tedford House Movers who moved it in place last Friday (just in time before the snow fell). A special thank you to the Peterborough Community Futures and Doughty Concrete, and John Kraayvanger for assisting with building the platform it is resting on. We appreciate all the donations that have come in for this new storage facility.
Our newest fundraising letter which was sent out last week will collect additional funds for the portable project including moving costs, purchasing shelving, tables, a computer etc. Please click here for the full text of the letter. For more information on ways you can donate, please click here. Your support is greatly appreciated! 
