ELMSDALE: A project aimed at providing locals, including teachers, with more history on East Hants has received federal support.
The East Hants Historical Society’s project Capturing and Sharing Our Cultural History is one of three in the East Hants area to receive an investment from the federal government. The total for the eight-week project through the Elmsdale and Lower Selma-based EHHS is $23,820.
The other two projects are through a group at Sipekne’katik First Nation (Shubenacadie area) and the East Hants Family Resource Centre in Elmsdale.
An event announcing the funding and making it official was held last week at the Historical Society’s office in the Elmsdale Business Park.
Dignitaries from the Municipality of East Hants, including Warden Eleanor Roulston; Hants East MLA John A. MacDonald; and Kings-Hants MP Kody Blois were in attendance.
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Pat Whidden, President with the EHHS, said Capturing and Sharing our Cultural History focuses on museum infrastructure, document content preservation, educational program development, and promotion of the past through video.
She explained the whole purpose of the fund was to help organizations like theirs recover from Covid and all the issues that Covid presented with not being able to have programs and not being able to raise funds in the manner that they were accustomed to doing.
“When we applied we were basically banking on the kind of things that we had done to compensate for Covid, which included providing video material for our virtual library,” said Whidden to the small crowd in Elmsdale.
Whidden mentioned about the settlement of people in East Hants. She said Peter Ashley had done a half a dozen video shorts for them on the 84th Regiment and the settlement here in East Hants after the American Revolution.
She said another person, who was hired to work on the Sharing and Capturing Our Cultural History project, Ed MacDonell has done a research video on the Gaelic settlement here in East Hands.
“It was basically attached to or well, not really attached, but as a part of the 84th Regiment settlement, because that’s realistically when a good many of the Gaelic settlers arrived in East Hants was following the American Revolution.”
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Whidden was looking at all names in Nine Mile River where she grew up, and there were MacDonald’s; McDougall’s, Fraser’s, and Grant’s.
“All of those names and who even gave a thought to where they came from or what their origins might have been?” she asked. “These are the kinds of things that we have in the virtual library. We decided that we really wanted to ramp that up.”
With that in mind, they have purchased a decent video camera, which means they will be looking at doing more video stuff, more interview material.
Whidden said another purchase with the funds was a Hewlett-Packard printer, which will allow them to scan and print up to tabloid size.
“It means that we can have digital copies of a lot of our collection if we choose to do so,” she said. “We could even get into a situation where we could do a little bit of publishing if we wanted to do that.”
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She said the person getting the most mileage out of that machine right now is MacDonell.
One of the aspects of the funding was to fund an eight-week contract with somebody to take their collection and align it with topics that would be reasonable to cover in various subjects such as history, economics, political science, and more.
“To that end, Ed has developed a Google Docs hub where teachers can go to research materials that they might use for classroom use,” Whidden said. “That use would be to provide to students for research purposes or to inform and so they can use examples from East Hants history to inform what they are doing in the classroom.
“That to me is one of the most exciting things.”
Blois said he was happy to be able to assist the EHHS in getting the funding from the federal government for such a project.
Members of MEH council that were there also appeared to be impressed at learning what the funding for the project would mean to the volunteer non-profit organization, which they support.
