Oral history program recognized
8 October 2012
By $curPaper.title
Published: September 27, 2012 10:00 AM
Updated: September 27, 2012 10:4210 AM
Burnaby's Community Heritage Commission has been recognized with a Heritage BC Award for its oral history project, that resulted in about 100 hours of audio recordings being digitized and made available online.
The recordings, interviews conducted in the 1970s and '80s with Burnaby pioneers such as former Burnaby reeve William Pritchard, Florence Hart Godwin and Blythe and Violet Eagles, were originally done on analogue audio tape, which was deteriorating, making them almost unplayable.
Now that they've been digitized, they're up on the city's Heritage Burnaby website where anyone can listen to them over the Internet.
The commission received a Heritage BC Award of Honour for the "effort, care and commitment demonstrated in the completion of this important project," according to a report from city archivist Arilea Sill. The award will be presented Oct. 19 at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.
Meanwhile, the project will move into its second phase—conducting and recording new interviews for posterity.
While the first series of interviews focused mainly on Burnaby in the 1930s and life during the Depression, and the subsequent film project From the Heart—The Freeman Legacy created hours of interview footage looking at life for Burnaby citizens during the war years, it's now time to look at the city's history in the decades after the Second World War, the report said.
Over the next several months, 20 to 30 longtime Burnaby residents will be solicited to share their stories of growing up in the city during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
"These years marked the most dramatic economic boom in the City's history: with its abundance of undeveloped land adjacent to the metropolis of Vancouver, Burnaby was a favoured site of post-war housing subdivisions, drive-in theatres, commercial retail and service centres and industrial parks," the report said.
"The resulting influx of new residents saw the population of Burnaby more than triple in a span of less than 20 years and it is hoped that the new oral history program will capture the stories of these residents who helped transform Burnaby into the modern city we know today."
The new interviews will be added to the Heritage Burnaby website early in 2013. Funding is available for the project from money already approved for the oral history project.
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