Saving the past

There is an old cliché that states to know the future, you must know the past. While there may or may not be some truth to that, there is definitely a value in preserving that past.

Right now, the Oshawa Museum and Archives is hard at work preserving this city’s history, including its latest project, which sees the pages of newspapers long gone captured and stored for future generations.

In fact, the pages of Oshawa newspapers past – with names like the Oshawa Vindicator and the city’s last daily, the Oshawa Times – having their pages put online for the world to see.

While the writers of a newspaper may have some bias over saving the printed word, archivist Jennifer Weymark put it best when she expressed why it is so important to save and preserve these yellowed and, at times, tattered pieces of paper.

“It’s important to have the newspapers and to have them accessible to people because they provide a context to things that you don’t get from just looking at a photograph,” she says.

In fact, this city has already lost much of its printed records of day-to-day life. If you’re looking for newspapers detailing what life was like in Oshawa on a daily basis during the First and Second World Wars, you’ll be hard pressed to find them after fires swallowed paper archives whole many years ago.

But now, thanks to the museum’s hard work and some generous grants from Library and Archives Canada, this city’s history will be preserved for generations to come.

And at the end of the day, whether it’s 1918 or 2016, a story about a biplane flying and later crashing on to the roofs of Oshawa’s downtown is still an exciting and interesting one.