Some of you may have been lucky enough to have parents or grandparents that purchased the local history book for you when they first came out. Or perhaps you inherited them or bought them at a flea market or sale. For family historians these are usually among the most treasured volumes in their libraries.

Two much sought after books for this area are “Along the Hills to the Valley: Huns Valley – Polonia District 1885-1985” by William R. Smith and “Looking Back: A History of Mountain Road, Manitoba” . Both books have been out of print for a long time with the Mountain Road book sold out before the centennial celebration began! Both of my copies are pretty tattered from overuse and the pages are marked (I know – sacrilege to some – with my notes). I can almost quote them both from heart.

As luck would have it, both of these books are online. The Manitobia project, which is “dedicated to providing Manitobans and other Canadians with extensive and more equitable access to the library and information resources of the province” is hosted at the University of Manitoba Digital Collections.

At this site you can read both of the books mentioned above along with “Rosedale Remembers”, “East of the Mountains” (a history of Eden, Birnie and area), “Forest to Field” (Clanwilliam RM history) and others. For myself I have been reading “A History of Riding Mountain and Area“. This is the area where my grandmother Helen (Grudeski) Kolesar grew up. So nice to see my great-grandparents wedding picture (wonder where that went!) and read some of the family history I remembered from when I was a kid.

If you are into more day to day data, then the newspaper collection might be more interesting for you. Unfortunately there is no Neepawa Press online, but they do have the Minnedosa Tribune from 1883 to 1922. How else would I have learned that my great grandfather lost a driving mare and a young horse colt in 1916! Wonder if he ever got them back?

Thank goodness for the search function so I didn’t have to read years of newspapers to find this tidbit. I entered “Kolesar” in the search items and all newspapers and books that had this search item appeared (note the red mark, that was my search term). Just keep in mind when you are using the search bar that the program is searching though a PDF file and if the pages were smeared or not copied correctly, it will not bring up your name even though it might be on the page.

If your polish is up to par (… and mine is not unfortunately), you might find articles from the Czas Newspaper like this one, for a play being staged in Polonia in 1927. Interesting to see all the actors, too bad there was no video of one of these plays.

I am so thankful that there are dedicated people who believe that knowledge is meant to be shared and make this information available free of charge to all of us. This is a great resource for family history or if you are just plain interested in the history of where you and your ancestors lived.

The University of Manitoba Digital Collections is hosted here: https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm:manitobia

“Along the Hills to the Valley” can be found at this link https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A3025999#page/1/mode/2up

“Looking Back” can be found at this link https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A3092574#page/1/mode/2up