Do you have a piece of personal history you want digitized? The Thorold Museum is here to help!
The museum’s board is organizing a special event tomorrow morning at their temporary headquarters at 2 Carleton Street, where people will be able to digitize their historical treasures.
“We want to get embedded into the community, and by taking on 2 Carleton, that gives us an operation centre to do so,” board member Steve Fulton tells ThoroldToday. “We're really just bringing the community in, just to say: ‘Hey, we're here, this is who we are.’”
2 Carleton Street used to house the Canadian Corps Museum but now that the Thorold Museum Board has taken over the building, they’re using it as a base to work on their plans for the Thorold Museum and Cultural Centre.
“It was about a five week process where we had to empty it,” says Fulton. “A lot of maintenance work had to be done, and then we got a summer student grant, so we got five summer students, and then we got our full-time staff person. So it's been a very, very busy five weeks bringing this all together.”
The hired staff is busy digitizing and cataloguing the entire collection of the museum.
“Preserving our Thorold heritage is of the utmost importance,” Fulton says. “Without any of that, none of us would be here. It's an opportunity to learn why, for example, Front Street is called Front Street. Why businesses have been established for so long, and the importance and how it affected people's lives throughout.”
To help them digitize the collection, the Museum Board has a wide variety of tools at their disposal.
“We have a lot of digitization equipment from the local genealogical society,” says Fulton. “We're offering that service to community members who may want to preserve family memories and stuff like that.”
It is Fulton’s hope that the community will come out in droves to learn more about the plans for the Thorold Museum and Cultural Centre.
“Come on in, see what the students are working on,” he says. “The other board members will be there and we can talk about what the Thorold Museum and Cultural Center will look like down the road.”
The event is happening Friday, July 26 from 9 a.m. until 12 p.m. at 2 Carleton Street.
