The following article first appeared in The Echo of Cantley Volume 24 no 7, February 2013. This article is made available for the enjoyment of others with the express permission of the Echo of Cantley.
Mark your calendar - Sunday, February 24 - 2pm - for Cantley's own "Heritage Day", "Family Day"....an afternoon to celebrate your own family's past!
There will be a fascinating illustrated talk by Carol Martin, "Discovering History in Cemeteries". Carol is author of "In Memory of Chelsea's Historic Cemeteries", historian, board member of the Gatineau Valley Historical Society and long-time editor of its renowned annual publication of local history - "Up the Gatineau!".
We encourage you, if you have any historic photos or material of Cantley, to bring them to our event. Tables will be set up for you to display these. We would like to know what historical resources Cantley has, so are looking for people to contact to discover more about our local heritage. Cantley 1889 has started collecting historic photos and archival material to record and catalogue; we are also establishing a Cantley component of the Gatineau Valley Historical Society (GVHS) Archives. The GVHS Archives has an extensive amount of material about the whole region of the Gatineau River Valley - you can visit them by appointment in Chelsea or online GVHS.ca if you are researching any history or genealogy of our area.
This day will mark Cantley 1889's second annual meeting. There will be handouts about our many accomplishments over the past year, as well as a very brief election. As at all our events, there will be refreshments and displays.
We chose to hold this event on a Sunday afternoon to encourage everyone, to attend....to discover more about Cantley's past. So please join us in this historic parish hall, for this celebration of our own, Cantley,...and your own family's ...heritage!
In the last Echo, we promised you an article about Cantley's recently relocated "Le Champagne" tugboat in this issue. Instead, the article will appear in the early April Echo, along with information about a special GVHS/Cantley 1889 evening with a Gatineau River theme ......on April 15 at La Grange de la Gatineau.
Entitled - What lies beneath: Cantley before the flood - Marc Coburn (president, Gatineau Valley Historical Society) will take us on a multi-media voyage up the Cantley side of Gatineau River, using Google Earth and archival photos and maps to reconstruct how the river looked before much of its natural and built environment was flooded in 1928, as a result of the construction of the hydro dams at Chelsea and Farmer's Rapids.