Following World War II, approximately 40,000 Holocaust survivors resettled in Canada. Ottawa became home to many of those Holocaust survivors and hundreds of their descendants.

The Ottawa-based Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship invited 11 of those survivors to share their stories.

The Historical Society of Ottawa is honoured to link their testimonials to the HSO Memory Project:

• Excerpts from Testimonials
• Full-length Testimonials

The HSO team was happy to attend Ottawa’s Heritage Day celebrations at City Hall on February 18, 2025.

It’s quiz time!

Again this year, the Historical Society of Ottawa had the honour of preparing the 2025 “Great Ottawa History Challenge”, published every February during Heritage Week in the Ottawa Citizen.

Here’s your chance to see how much you know about Ottawa’s past: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-history-quiz

Author and historian Eric Thierry tells us about the life of Samuel de Champlain, North American explorer, founder and administrator of Quebec.

The Historical Society of Ottawa (established as the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa in 1898) has been spreading awareness of Ottawa's fascinating past for 126+ years, including founding and operating the Bytown Museum for eight decades. Join us for an exploration of the beginnings and legacy of one of Canada's oldest historical societies. Guest speaker: Connie Wren-Gunn.

The HSO Blog has been live for a year! We launched this platform as an extension of our objective to preserve and increase public knowledge of the history of Ottawa, including its people and places. Our vision was to create a space where the history of the Ottawa area could be shared through an engaging blog platform.

Thank you to all who have contributed and shared their interest in the blog!

Be sure to catch up on past posts and other great HSO publications found under the publications section of our website.

As always, if you are interested in writing for the blog, please get in contact with us by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We are always excited to see what fascinating stories make their way to us and can’t wait to see what this year brings!

The HSO Blog has been live for a year! We launched this platform as an extension of our objective to preserve and increase public knowledge of the history of Ottawa, including its people and places. Our vision was to create a space where the history of the Ottawa area could be shared through an engaging blog platform.

Thank you to all who have contributed and shared their interest in the blog!

Be sure to catch up on past posts and other great HSO publications found under the publications section of our website.

As always, if you are interested in writing for the blog, please get in contact with us by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We are always excited to see what fascinating stories make their way to us and can’t wait to see what this year brings!

On the morning of December 2nd, 2024, eight members of the Historical Society of Ottawa attended the final presentation of the HIS4135 Canadian Digital History Course at the University of Ottawa, The class had taken on the project of digitizing several of the scrapbooks created by our founders, the Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa, (WCHSO), during the first half of the 20^th Century. The students would then conduct some analysis of the contents of the scrapbooks. Their professor, Sarah Templier, explained that this project had been intended for a few years previous, but the pandemic shutdown access to the City of Ottawa Archives and so to the scrapbooks. She went on to explain that scrapbooks were selected, in part, on their completeness. Scrapbooks that contained a lot of loose articles just stuck between the pages were not used as they would have required a lot more work to assemble them prior to digitization. There were other scrapbooks, created by individuals and donated to the WCHSO, but these were not investigated, the research being restricted to what the WCHSO, as an organization, selected. Five full scrapbooks were however digitized and are now available online for the first time.

The class was divided into teams of three students, each focussed on a different theme, and not all working with the same digitized scrapbooks. The themes investigated were: Arts and Culture, Prominent People, Women in Sport, Women in the Public Sphere and Military History. There were some general observations common to most groups despite their specific research areas. Many commented that it was interesting to see what each scrapbooker felt was worth preserving. Equally interesting was what was “missing” from the scrapbook. They could not determine if those items we would deem today as “missing” were not collected because they were not covered by the local newspapers at that time, were not considered to be of sufficient significance or not of interest to that particular scrapbooker. It was also noted that although the scrapbooks were generally in date order, there were also cases where it seemed that articles had been placed onto pages where they would fit so as not to waste the space. Many of the scrapbookers dated their items, but the exact source was seldom preserved.. There seems to have been little collected on what we would now call marginalized communities or immigrant communities. The identification of women proved a constant frustration as, in that period, married women were identified as “Mrs. Someone”, with the resulting loss of connection to their former families and accomplishments. All groups displayed their project web pages and discussed how they had integrated additional research, such as photos, videos or sound recordings to enhance the experience of the viewer, and how they had incorporated maps, word clouds and juxta positioning of findings to produce the same effect.

The Arts and Culture team noted that, despite the lack of government funding, there was a lot of activity in and interest in the cultural landscape of Ottawa. There was also a more diverse population represented in the scrapbooks, including frequent references to Jewish theatre. A map of cultural venues was displayed. Also of interest were a number of famous individuals in the field, especially Yousuf Karsh, who were featured.  

The Prominent People team discovered that while some people who garner significant mention in the scrapbooks are still well known today, such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, others are virtually unknown to the digital world. They also found that the scrapbooker held the power to preserve an individual through their collection. As such, relatives and friends of the scrapbooker achieved a higher level of prominence than we might now attribute to them.

The Women in Sport team noted that there were certain sports that society deemed appropriate for women and that it was understood that women should participate in these sports in an appropriate manner. Thus while words such as “strong” and “powerful” would be used to describe male athletes, words such as “graceful” and “elegant” would be used to describe female athletes. The team also revealed the disparity of opportunity afforded to men and women interested in sport. The achievements of Barbara Ann Scott were well covered in the scrapbooks.

The Women in the Public Sphere team looked into where women achieved positions of leadership in the community and how this was reflected in the scrapbooks. Much of this happened in volunteer organizations and Women’s Clubs, such as our own WCHSO. Religious organizations, such as the Catholic Women’s League offered other options. The team highlighted the work of women in the Canadian Red Cross, contrasting their limited role during the First World War, doing fundraising and knitting in Canada, to their more evolved role during the Second World War, which saw women serving in large numbers overseas. The team also noted that the rise of women was not always well received.

The Military History team focussed on three time periods. Scrapbook 2 was primarily focussed on the period immediately following the First World War. The WCHSO scrapbookers collected stories related to demobilization and returning soldiers. Special interest in the 38th Battalion was noted. A few years of the interwar period, 1934/35 and 1937 were remarkable for the almost total lack of information related to the Canadian military, apart from the annual Armistice Day commemoration. This accurately reflected the state of military affairs in Canada at the time. Scrapbook 5 covered the period of 1940/41 and was dominated by the military build-up in Canada and a growing spirit of patriotism and support for the Crown.     

The culmination of their project work, along with the five scanned scrapbooks, is now available to the public and can be viewed at: Scrapbooking Ottawa History or to enter into your browser: https://sites.google.com/view/scrapbookingottawahistory/home

The Historical Society of Ottawa would like to thank and congratulate the students for the work they have undertaken on our behalf to make this material more accessible to researchers. One student did caution that although the .pdf versions of the scrapbooks are searchable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software tools, these tools are not 100% reliable and may miss occurrences of the text string being searched for. 

As a gesture of our appreciation, we will be giving Sarah Templier and each of her students: Gina Aiello, Anthony "Tony" Butticci, Daniel Cantin, Asia Csabi, Kristine Feria, Chenxuan Fu, Émilie Hollingsworth, Malcolm La Prairie, Caleb Ka Yu Lee, Noah Louden, Brennan Macey, Anthony Martimbeault, Emma Penwell, Isabelle Schneider and Ethan Stitt, a one year complimentary membership to the Historical Society of Ottawa. We hope to see you all at our events for many years to come.

Our final Museum Club outing for 2024 took place on the morning of Wednesday, November 20, and was a private tour of the National Research Council of Canada’s facility at 100 Sussex Drive. Thirteen of our members were greeted by Steven LeClair, Chief Archivist of the NRC. We were surprised to learn that apart from Library and Archives Canada, the NRC is the only federal agency that is permitted to operate an archive. All others must send their documents and artifacts to the LAC, but due to the need for rapid access to information by researchers, the NRC operates its own archive and so can respond to researchers in a day or so.

Steven gathered us in the original Council Chambers of the NRC and told us some of its early history, being founded in 1916 as the “Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research”. It was a volunteer body whose membership changed along with the problems under investigation. By 1924, Henry Marshall Tory had been hired and made Chair, becoming the first President in 1928.

Steven explained that under Tory’s leadership the property occupied by the Edwards Mill on Sussex Drive was purchased and the former buildings were converted into labs. These included a wind-tunnel and a water channel. Known as the John Street Labs, the buildings proved unsuitable and a purpose-built facility was opened in 1932 at 100 Sussex Drive.

Affectionately known as the “Temple of Science” and officially known simply as building “S 77”, it is a magnificent brick and stone structure done in Neo-Classical style. Steven pointed out, as he led us on a tour of the building, the repeated use of sets of 8 Doric columns and of the Rose, Thistle, Leek, and Fleur-de-lys carvings, which were considered to represent Canada’s “founding races”, the English, Scottish, Welsh, and French. He also showed us a ceiling on which the conservation work included the use of human saliva to kill bacteria that had grown on it. The building still has many working labs which were, of course, off-limits on the tour.

We learnt from Steven, that their second President, General Andrew McNaughton, was also a civil engineer He officially held the post from 1935 to 1944, though from 1939 he had been recalled to military service and most of the day-to-day operation was led by C. J. MacKenzie, who would succeed McNaughton as President. Under McNaughton and MacKenzie the NRC was refocused to support the Allied efforts prior to and during the Second World War. The research was wide ranging and productive generating improvements in such diverse areas as powdered milk and eggs and preserving bacon to help feed the people of England, developments in explosives, anti-submarine warfare and RADAR. Following the war, it fell to MacKenzie and later E. W. R. Steacie, who held the post of President from 1952 to 1962, to transition the NRC back to its peacetime pursuits.

Throughout the tour, Steven took the opportunity to highlight some of the inventions or refinements developed at the NRC. These include the first atomic reaction in Canada, which took place at 100 Sussex Drive and later the development of the ZEEP nuclear reactor. The NRC developed Canadian Oil Light Acid, (CANOLA), originally based on rapeseed oil. NRC scientists were involved in the development of 4 track recording, the synthesizer, practical electric wheelchairs, building materials, the pacemaker, pressure molding, satellite antennas, the Canadarm and many, many other innovations. Many of these advancements were achieved through the enlightened policy of a number of the Presidents to allow their scientists to spend part of their time pursuing their own personal areas of interest and investigation.

After a brief walk-through of the original NRC library and stacks, we concluded our fantastic two hour tour in the office of Gerhard Hertzberg, which is preserved in his honour. Hertzberg, one of Canada’s most prominent scientists in the fields of Physics and Physical Chemistry, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971. He served with the NRC from 1948 until his death in 1999 at age 94.

Addendum from Steven Leclair

Here is the link to the NRC Digital Repository for the NRC Archive’s photos, the AVRO Arrow collection, and a few others: NRC Digital Repository - Canada.ca

FYI – for non-water marked photos people can request directly to me using the title or item identifier. There are no costs and everything posted is available to download.

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Some of my historical posts: Under the microscope: The John Street Labs