The cultural history of what is now Ontario stretches back more than 10,000 years. Many Nations and many peoples have called this place home. MyOntario – A vision over time marks this long history by opening a conversation among Ontarians about our experiences, identities, values and aspirations.
We are asking people from across the province to share their stories – the places, memories, photos, artifacts, artworks and traditions that inspire you, that motivate you and help define who you are. Be the province's storytellers, record keepers, historians and visionaries!
Let's build a deeper understanding, showcase our diversity and create a lasting record that reflects the breadth, depth and complexity of our great province as we look to the future.
Katherine Low
The House on Drake Street
Number 3. Built in 1876, this house has both witnessed and been subject to many changes – it doesn’t look quite the same now, but I think it looks pretty good for 141.
When my parents bought the house with two very small girls in tow, my grandmother cried. It was, to pu
Marshall Pynkoski (Co-Artistic Director of Opera Atelier)
Art in the face of adversity
Opera Atelier’s 30th anniversary in 2016 was a watershed season for the company. It marked our return to the Royal Opera House at Versailles and our arrival in France on November 13 – the day of the terrorist attacks. Opera Atelier’s production of Lully’s Armide reopen
Niagara Historical Society & Museum
Niagara-on-the-Lake became one of the several places that received poor children from the streets and workhouses of Britain. In 1868, Maria Rye purchased the former Niagara Courthouse and Gaol located just outside Old Town. She converted the building into an orphanage known as “Our Western Home” (OW
Carl Benn (Department of History, Ryerson University)
Edwardian home photos
I possess 16 photographs from c.1905 of my great-grandparents’ home in St. Catharines. At a personal level, I like these pictures because they record details about the life of my ancestors. The images also show some furnishings I knew growing up in the 1950s and 1960s because
Amanda J. Ferry
All the different cultures that are welcome here.
- Amanda J. Ferry, Emancipation Day, Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site, August 5, 2017
Kathy Stinson (author of books for young people)
When I first started going to the cottage that has been in my husband’s family for more than 100 years, I loved the sense of continuity I felt there, as five generations enjoyed the traditions that Grandfather Gordon established in the early 1900s. And the place. The gorgeous combinations of water,
Pamela
The St. Lawrence River has always been an integral part of the Brockville community. For the Fulford Family, who lived in town from the mid-nineteenth century onward and saw their fortunes skyrocket after 1890 because of investment in the "Pink Pills for Pale People", having the means the entertain
Karolyn Smardz Frost (archaeologist, historian and award-winning author)
Digging for the Promised Land
In 1985, the Toronto school board and Ontario's culture ministry created the Archaeological Resource Centre. There, schoolchildren and volunteers could dig into their own city's past, and explore the multi-cultures that make Ontario's heritage so remarkably rich.
Un
J.M. Rowe, Esquesing Historical Society
The Great War 1914-1918
The home front – Georgetown
This quilt was created through the efforts of the Georgetown Women’s Institute in 1915. The citizens were asked to pay 10 cents per name to have it embroidered onto a square for the quilt. It was completed in time for the 1915 Esquesing (George
Susan Bryan (volunteer Chair of the Nature Reserves Committee of the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists)
Someone has passed this way before
I’m standing on the deck of a small boat, riding the swells of the Nipigon River where it widens into Lake Superior. In front of me, a rock cliff rises straight out of the water. On this cliff are a series of pictographs – lines, circles and other symbols – as we