This is a hybrid presentation co-hosted with the Kent Historical Society.
Researcher, author and long time OGS member, Kae Elgie, will meet with us in-person to discuss her experience and tips learned while researching the stories of all the people who lived on the same two hundred acres of land where she grew up. Kae learned how to identify and date the artefacts (“arrowheads”) that so many farmers have informally discovered on their land, how to use land records to piece together the stories of the many settler families who consecutively settled that land, how to discover the social and economic context and setting for these stories, and how to tie hundreds of “facts” into a very interesting story.
This presentation is free and open for anyone to attend at the McKinlay Funeral Home’s Reception Centre at 463 St. Clair St., Chatham. Please park in the Hakim Optical parking lot (not the funeral home).
For those unable to attend in person, simply register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87883343837
Kae Elgie grew up on a 200-acre farm at Dawn Mills in Camden Gore Township. Although she currently lives in Waterloo, the fact that three of her five siblings and several nieces and nephews and their children live in Chatham-Kent keeps her keenly interested and connected to the land where she grew up. She is Past Board Chair of Architectural Conservancy Ontario, a provincial charity which encourages the conservation and reuse of buildings, districts and landscapes of architectural, historic or cultural significance. It’s an organization which has allowed her to put interest in heritage and her passion for making it accessible to others, into practice. Her pre-retirement work as Manager, Information Technology for Region of Waterloo Library and her ongoing learning about how data is organized greatly helped her family history and genealogy research work. Her stint as a reporter-photographer for the Petrolia Advertiser-Topic and North Lambton Sun newspapers honed her writing skills.
