Living Heritage Podcast Ep062 Retaining and Recruiting Volunteers

Debbie O'Rielly is Coordinator for Volunteer Mount Pearl (VMP), an office created in 2014 by the Mount Pearl Sport Alliance. VMP was established to address the volunteer needs of community groups in the Mount Pearl area, and to act as a hub to connect volunteers and the groups that need them. Debbie does community outreach with seniors, youth and all those in between. She provides volunteer related news and shares volunteer job details on her website, through social media and in a quarterly newsletter. We talk about the work and objectives of Volunteer Mount Pearl, retaining and recruiting volunteers, using social media, linking youth with seniors, bread and raspberry jam making workshops, the Art of Storytelling project, and community gardens.

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Railway Memories Photo and Story Swap - Harbour Grace

Harbour Grace Railway Station. Photo by Michael Philpott.

Did you work in the building or on the railway line? Do you know someone or have a family member who did? Do you have memories of taking the train? Do you have old photos or items associated with the Harbour Grace Railway Station? The Heritage Foundation NL, in partnership with the Town of Harbour Grace, wants to know!

We’ll be hosting a Railway Memories Photo and Story Swap in the in the Danny Cleary Harbour Grace Community Centre, 1 Cee Bee’s Way, Harbour Grace on Sunday December 4, 2016 at 7:30pm.

“We are looking for anyone connected to the Newfoundland Railway in Conception Bay North including labourers, station agents, telegraphers, and flagmen, as well as locals with memories of railway travel.” says the foundation’s folklorist Dale Jarvis. “If you have memories or photographs of the Newfoundland railway, we would love to hear from you.”

The oral history project is part of the foundation’s Collective Memories Project. This project is an initiative of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, with funding provided by the Department of Children, Seniors, and Social Development. The Collective Memories Project invites seniors to record their stories and memories for sharing.

Come for a cup of tea, and bring photos, calendars, timetables, tickets, objects to show off. This information will be used in the restoration of the train station. There will be a scanning station there to digitize or photograph everything that people bring, so you can take your originals home with you. The information gathered will be used to help restore and celebrate the old railway station in Harbour Grace.

For more information please contact Terra Barrett with the Heritage Foundation toll free at 1-888-739-1892 ext. 5 or email terra@heritagefoundation.ca or Natalie Austin with the Town of Harbour Grace at 709-596-3042 or email natalieaustin@hrgrace.ca.  Click here for the Facebook event.

#FolklorePhoto: Windsor Taxis and Buses

97-243 GFWHS.
Goodyear Taxi Service, circa 1909, located at the Grand Falls Station (Windsor), was operated by Josiah Goodyear.
It boasted of 8-10 horse drawn “Victorias”, with upholstered seats for passengers.

This weeks Folklore Photo comes from the Grand Falls-Windsor Heritage Society and is circa 1909.  The photo is of Goodyear Taxi Service located at the Grand Falls Station (Windsor).  This Taxi Service was operated by Josiah Goodyear and boasted 8-10 horse drawn “Victorias” with upholstered seats for passengers.  Roy Oldford of Grand Falls-Windsor remembered similar horse and carts being used by Stewart's to deliver groceries to the community in the 1950s.

This photo is one of the images from the Heritage Society which will be featured in an upcoming booklet on the merchants of Main Street based on oral history interviews completed in Windsor in September.  Tomorrow afternoon we are meeting with the Heritage Society to discuss a pop up exhibit to go along with launch of the booklet in the coming new year.

The booklet will focus on the merchants from the bigger well known stores such as Cohen's, Riff's, and Stewart's to the buses (or taxis) which lined Main Street and provided transportation between the towns of Windsor and Grand Falls. Several people described the buses which would run between Main Street in Windsor and High Street in Grand Falls and even delivered lunches to the mill workers.

Included below is a short audio clip from Roy Oldford who grew up in Windsor. In this clip Roy talks about the popularity of the buses and also tells a humorous story about using his friend's father's bus to earn a bit of pocket change when they were teenagers.


~Terra Barrett

Get your long underwear ready! It's a #MummersFestival #Podcast! #FolkloreThursday

In celebration of the return of the Mummers Festival on November 26th, we are rebroadcasting one of our previous podcasts, an interview with Ryan Davis, the mummer-in-charge of the festival!

Ryan Davis has been running the Mummers Festival since 2009. He holds an MA in Folklore and a BA in Communication Studies. It was his interest in festivals, celebrations, and costuming that led him to mummering traditions. The Mummers Festival promotes the continuation and evolution of traditional arts and performance by encouraging active participation in mummering activities. The Mummers Festival helps to keep mummering alive and contemporary and adds to the population’s pride of place.

In this edition of the Living Heritage Podcast, Ryan talks about what mummers are and what they do, the beginnings of the Mummers Festival and how it has grown over seven years, the successes and challenges of running a festival, and what he hopes the festival will offer in the future.

See you at the parade on December 10th!

Listen on the Digital Archive:

http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/ich_oral/id/678/rec/1

#Folklorephoto Do you have memories of the Newfoundland Railway?

This weeks Folklore Photo is a still taken from one of the 8mm reels that came to us from the Grand Falls-Windsor Heritage Society. This particular film features an event taking place at the railway station in Grand Falls-Windsor. While the date and particulars of the event are unidentified, it is an example of the goings-on that took place around train stations in our province. The film shows a train pulling up to the Grand Falls station, which is decorated with Union Jacks. Crowds are gathered around the station, waiting to see the visiting dignitary step out of the train car. The visitors arrive, step from the train and are greeted with handshakes and photos before they are whisked away in waiting cars.    

A train pulling up to the Grand Falls Railway Station

Stay tuned for the full reels to be posted soon! If you can identify the visitors or any other individuals in the film, please email me at kelly@heritagefoundation.ca

#CollectiveMemories Booklet Launch - The Story of the Spar: An Oral History of the Hazel Pearl

Left to Right: Roy Hiscock, Ben Hiscock, Minnie Hiscock, Albert Hiscock, and Sarah Hiscock. 

On Tuesday afternoon the Heritage Foundation and the Champney’s West Heritage Group Inc. launched the booklet The Story of the Spar: An Oral History of the Hazel Pearl. The booklet launch took place in the Ella Freeman Heritage House in Champney’s West, Bonavista Peninsula. There were twenty community members who came out for the launch including four of the people who were interviewed about the wreck of the Hazel Pearl. The Heritage House provided tea, coffee, and some treats for everyone to enjoy.

The Story of the Spar: An Oral History of the Hazel Pearl is the second booklet in the Collective Memories Series produced by the Heritage Foundation. This booklet focuses on the Hazel Pearl shipwreck and includes archival research, field recording measurements of the spar, and oral history interview transcripts. The interviews were completed by Terra Barrett and Dale Jarvis, the measurements and drawing of the spar by Michael Philpott and Li Xingpei, background research by Sarah Hannon, and the booklet was edited by Heather Elliott.

As stated in The Sailor’s Word-Book:

Li Xingpei measuring the spar in July 2016.

The spar which sits outside the Heritage House was once a part of the Hazel Pearl. This spar was part what sparked the interest in the story of the Hazel Pearl and was accidentally brought ashore by fisherman Wayne Freeman when it became tangled in his capelin seine several summers back. 

If you want to learn more about the spar or the Hazel Pearl you can head to collections.mun.ca to hear the full interviews or you can check out PDF version of the booklet here!

The Hazel Pearl booklet is part of the foundation’s Collective Memories Project. This project is an initiative of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, with funding provided by the Department of Children, Seniors, and Social Development. The Collective Memories Project invites seniors to record their stories and memories for sharing.

~Terra Barrett

Reviewing old photographs in the Heritage House.

Living Heritage Podcast Ep061 Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports

Anna Kearney Guigné is an independent folklorist and adjunct professor affiliated with Memorial University of Newfoundland’s ethnomusicology program. An historian at heart, Kearney Guigné has extensively written about twentieth-century folksong collectors and collecting practices. Kearney Guigné also explores the wide range of influences that continue to shape our rich musical tradition including such popular media as newspapers, broadsides, songsters, and radio programs, vinyl recordings.

This November, Anna will release her fourth major publication The Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports: As Taken from Kenneth Peacock’s Field Collection, 1951-1961. We talk about the life, fieldwork, and legacy of Kenneth Peacock, and the work of selecting songs for publication in this new book.

Listen on the Digital Archive:
http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/ich_oral/id/692/rec/1

Take note! 

The University of Ottawa Press and the Canadian Museum of History official book launch of

The Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports

As taken From Kenneth Peacock’s Field Collection, 1951-1961

By Anna Kearney Guigné

Wednesday November 30th from 7:30 to 9:00 pm

MMaP Gallery

Research Centre for Music, Media and Place

Second floor, Arts & Culture Centre, St. John’s, NL

#Folklorephoto The cross in St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Cemetery, St. Lawrence

When driving through St. Lawrence a large concrete crucifix can be seen from the road, standing tall among the headstones in St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Cemetery. While we were in St. Lawrence Dale interviewed Thérèse Slaney about her life, and she talked proudly about her husband Herb, an engineer who designed the cross.

The cross in St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Cemetery

After the interview, Thérèse showed us some of Herbs beautiful technical drawings, some of the cross and others of the St. Lawrence Grotto which he also designed.

Herb Slaney's technical drawing of the cross

In the following clip you can listen to Thérèse Slaney talk about the work Herb did on the cross.

#CollectiveMemories Roadtrip to St. Lawrence

Terra Barrett and Kelly Drover with the material to be digitized!

Last Thursday Dale, Kelly and I took a drive down the Burin Peninsula to meet with the St. Lawrence Historical Advisory Committee. When we arrived on Thursday afternoon we stopped in to their office in the town hall where we sorted through the material they needed digitized. We ended up taking 20 VHS, 21 CDs and DVDs, 4 cassettes, 4 Kodak slide carousels filled with slides and a small box of assorted slides. This material will be digitized over the next little while and will certainly keep Kelly busy. After this successful visit we drove to Burin in order to take a couple of photos of the designated buildings in the community. We also stopped in to the Heritage Café for a delicious supper.

Public meeting on oral history projects.

In the evening we met with community members in the St. Lawrence Public Library in order to discuss how to do an oral history project. Dale gave an introduction to oral history interviewing including how to focus the interview, reasons to conduct an informal “pre-interview” and the sort of questions to ask. We also ran through the basics of consent forms and how to process the material once you collect it. This included an explanation of tape logs and suggestions of ways to use the material such as booklets, audio clips, etc.

ThérèseSlaney and Dale Jarvis.

Reviewing Herb Slaney's plans.

The following morning we had an interview with Thérèse Slaney about growing up in St. Pierre, her move to St. Lawrence and marriage to Herb Slaney, a description of the first autopsy performed in the community and its importance to miners, an explanation of how the tradition of Mardi Gras started in St. Lawrence, and her husband Herb’s work engineering the cross and grotto in the community. Thérèse was a wonderful woman to chat with and described delicious French foods over a cup a tea in her kitchen.

St. Lawrence's grotto.

The cross in St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Cemetery.

After our interview with Therese we had a look at the community’s grotto and cross engineered by Herb Slaney and visited a couple of graveyards. Our last stop on the drive back to St. John’s was to the community of Petite Forte to photograph another designated building and take a look at the beautiful harbour. All in all a very successful trip to the Burin Peninsula!

Petite Forte

~Terra Barrett