Goal for smaller communities is to archive their past online

"We can often provide pictures and other information."

While people searching for a family connection to their past is the main request for City's archives department, it's far from the only one.

Archivist Carolyn Hill said staff have even helped supply background materials for a murder case, which took place in Eastern Canada.

Hill revealed the matter during her report to city council at its Aug. 23 regular meeting.

"The case was reopened, and the detective contacted us to see if we had any information about her so they could put a face to the victim."

"This was a long time after the murder. "

"Just last year, I saw in the newspaper, I was in Halifax, they had actually convicted (the person). They had finally caught the person who had done it – her ex-boyfriend – and had finally convicted him because of DNA evidence."

"Part of the portrait they showed of the person, as the victim, was some of the information that we had provided to them," said Hill.

RCMP has also been known to use the City's extensive archives to help with an investigation.

"We have a collection of old telephone books back to the 1950s, so they go through those, tracking people and where they've lived," explained Hill.

Yet, bulk of requests the archivist department handles are from people with an interest in tracing their family roots, otherwise known as genealogy.

"A lot of people contact us from England, from the United States, Australia, Norway, Sweden … Ireland because their families moved here, and they have lost track of them."

Another interesting request, pointed out by Hill, is from people who own an older home and they are looking to find out how it was built, and how the structure has changed over the years.

Wetaskiwin a small community of 12,000

Meanwhile, Hill told council that the department is in the midst of making digital copies of the photographs of Carl Walin, who had his own photography business in Wetaskiwin from 1919 to 1959.

"It's a huge collection. It's deteriorating. We have to get them reformatted, and also you can't print eight by 10 negatives, easily, anymore, so we have to get them reformatted," Hill told council.

An estimated 5,000 images have already been converted, with many of them appearing online, but Hill told city council that there are about 100,000 more photographs to go.

The photos, 1,000 of them, have already been posted online, and are used extensively for books and displays and researchers.

Hill said the department would like to do more with the collection, and one of the ideas being bantered about is a possible coffeetable book.

Last update: 03-09-2010 00:33

Two headstones used by one family as a conversation piece turned into a wild goose chase for North Bay City police over the recent Civic holiday Weekend

Police learned that both persons named on the stones were buried in other towns. One headstone was ditched because of a spelling mistake and the other was replaced more than 30 years ago.

The monument company disposed of the stones by burying them in a vacant piece of land near the pond.

A residence was built on the land a few years later, and the stones were unearthed while a drainage ditch was being dug.

When the new residents learned from the company that the stones were waste, they kept them as conversation pieces for several years until they decided to abandon them in the pond, police said in a news release  given in the afternoon.

It said the couple thought the stones would sink to the muddy bottom.

They didn't.

I image they're the conversation pieces of the City and may even get a chuckle from the  Genealogy community.

We are also aware that stones can be repaired or replaced by families because of errors, etc.

It should be at some point in a sales contract that the old stones can be crushed and reused in some other fashion if the family does not wish to keep the old stone.

Maybe this would not have happened if the events leading up to this situation were different.

Sources: North Bay Nuggett, North Bay Police Services.

Last update: 10-08-2010 22:12