The Millbrook and Cavan Historical Society held its Annual General Meeting on May 23 in the Fireside Lounge at Centennial Place in Millbrook, celebrating the end of a successful year of programming and some significant milestones.
Board member and treasurer Kim McLeod has been heading up the Historical Society’s Indexing Project for the past five years. The Society has one of the largest local newspaper collections in Canada. Volunteers have been painstakingly recording over 100,000 names appearing in nearly 750 issues of Millbrook newspapers from the period between 1920 and 1962. The Indexing Project has now been completed – an outstanding accomplishment.
The names have now been uploaded into The Ontario Name Index (TONI), a searchable site hosted by Ontario Ancestors and available worldwide to genealogists and others interested in this area. TONI shows where information about a particular name can be found. The papers are available on a pay-per-view basis and will potentially provide revenue to the Historical Society in the coming years. Kim gave a special shout out to Al Richards and Paul McKnight – two members of the indexing team who each plowed through several hundred papers.
Kim reported that, in addition to the newspapers, a searchable index has been created for both local history narratives This Green and Pleasant Land (printed in 1990) and A Brief History of Cavan Township and Millbrook Village (1816-1937) These indexes have also been submitted to TONI to aid those who are searching for their roots in this area.
By Celia Hunter
