Established in 1999, the Altona and Area Archive (officially incorporated as the Altona & District Heritage Research Centre) houses thousands of documents from the community's past from births and obituaries to school registers, personal collections and more than 500 catalogued photographs. The Archive is open to the public Mondays from 1 to 3pm, and is located in Golden West Plaza.
Board Chair Dave Harms has found it only takes a little bit for those who access the archive to go even deeper into its collection.
"In my experience, I've had a lot of private phone calls, and over and over they are all people that are from the 50s and 60s," he explained. "As a rule, there's very few young people asking any questions, but I'm amazed that once they ask a question, how many times they will come back, and will have further to the original questions. Sometimes, I find out those people are from Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. that have moved away. They are the ones who have the most questions, because they will spend summer holidays here, and then they will want to know where their grandfathers graves are. That is a resource that is plentiful in the archives."
Other items housed with the group include Altona Mall Developments 1970 to 2013, Altona and Area Refugee Committee documents, Optimist Club papers, several large personal collections and more than 500 catalogued photos.
New volunteers always needed
One of the newest volunteers is Liz Wieler, who shared her story of why she joined the group.
"My brother Jake died in November 2023, and he had these ten filing cabinet drawers full of documents, and so instead of throwing them out, we knew how important it was because he was on the board of the Altona & District Heritage Research Centre, we donated it," she explained. "We decided we would catalog that information... It took us almost 500 hours to do that."
She pointed to YiP high school student Alyssa Ewankevich in being a huge help in that cataloguing effort. Wieler noted those documents included original land titles, and original birth and death certificates, but also something else the Archive is seeking.
"We're looking for the stories that people have," she said. "The stories that my brother would, for instance, talk to somebody and write up, and it's in there."
She added the Archive is not only looking for materials from the 1800s, but also more recent years, too, like the 1970s and 80s.
"Those are stories that need to be told and need to be kept, because who else is going to do it if we don't have it," she offered. "I think it's important we continue that tradition and keep those documents."
Raising the Archive's profile
Board member and Secretary Art Wiebe added the group is trying to raise its profile as much as possible in hopes of attracting new volunteers. Those efforts have included making board meetings open to the public (they happen every other month, with the next in August), joining the Altona and District Chamber of Commerce, advertising the Archive's opening times on the Enbridge electronic sign in town (Mondays from 1pm to 3pm) and the recent development of a new logo. Another way the board is growing its profile is through partnerships, like the one that brought student Alyssa Ewankevich to them.
"We wanted to reach out to the younger generation, because the majority of us are sixty years and older currently on the board," he explained. "We got connected with W.C. Miller College where our Altona & Area Archive is one of many other options for their students to complete their 80 hours of student community internship program credit. We had our first student this year and it was just phenomenal."
Another relatively new partnership is with the local MCC Gift and Thrift Store where when they receive historical documents, books, maps or photographs they don't have a market for, they contact the Archive to see if its interested before they go to recycling.
"The third one is a very timely one," noted Wiebe. "We are in the infancy of identifying photos by e-mail, by emailing photos to individuals who might be able to identify the people in the photo, the occasion the photo was taken in the approximate year and other interesting details related to the photos. We have so many photo, but often many of them have no information, and the door to identifying the people that are on those pictures is closing."
Why take the time to preserve?
And the ultimate question, why painstakingly take the time to catalogue all of these items?
"It's for proper austerity, right?" stressed Harms. "You don't want this stuff to get lost. The importance of it is people who are writing family history books, and stuff like that, they need this material to verify what they're going to write. There's lots of documents and land titles, and stuff like that, that they are very interested in. I believe that is a major thing the Archive provides."
You can reach out to the Archive by calling 1-431-965-7009, or emailing altonaarchive@gmail.com .