William Ryan's memoirs are compelling; they provide a glimpse of his life growing up in Pakenham Township during the early 20th century. He witnessed so many events throughout his life, reflected in his positive words about local, good-hearted people. Some are funny, like an encounter with a balking milking machine; while some are tragic: losing three family members in a car accident at a CPR train crossing in 1919, and most devastatingly, the sudden loss of his beloved wife in January of ...

Written by fellow Canadians from Cape Breton Island to Prince Edward Island, from Montreal to Vancouver, this book reveals the people, the history and the special moments that give Canada such a distinctive charm and character.

Eccentric, unexpected, and told by the city’s most popular historian, Ghost Road and Other Forgotten Stories of Windsor is the city like you’ve never seen it before.

Gavin Hamilton Green was well-known to Goderich visitors as the "racy, entertaining and genial proprietor" of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. His writings describe the colourful, sometimes wily ways of pioneer history in Colborne Township and Huron County.Green supplies a large repertoire of witty anecdotes, which together with several illustrations of old-timers and old places, give his book the true atmosphere of the times to which they relate.The reader is carried from chuckle...

Broadcaster and bestselling author Mike McCardell haunts British Columbia’s past in order to summon spellbinding tales of Western Canada.Reprising his 2013 bestseller Haunting Vancouver, Mike McCardell summons the ghost of real-life pioneer Jock Linn to provide hair-raising and humorous versions of what really happened during some of the formative events that shaped British Columbia. McCardell’s ghostly narrator explains how Victoria became BC’s capital (s...

The Almaguin Highlands is a region that was once coveted for its game, silver birch and majestic white pine. For centuries this area stretched up to the shores of Lake Nipissing and embraced an unbroken forest that remained largely intact save where lakes, streams and beaver meadows punctuated the forest floor. In 1900, the northernmost areas of the District of Parry Sound were still not accessible by even a conventional roadway. Homesteaders, their claims precariously strung along the Pic...

The Marks Brothers may well have been the most remarkable theatrical family in Canadian history. A phenomenon on the vaudeville circuit, the seven brothers left the farm and took to the boards and the footlights throughout the latter part of the 19th century and into the 1920s. The brothers from Christie Lake, near Perth in Eastern Ontario, played to an estimated eight million Canadians, as well as to sizeable audiences in the United States. Their road shows, largely melodramas and comedy,...

The Almaguin Highlands, an extensive territory covering a 90 km corridor from Huntsville, north to Callander, west to Dunchurch and east to the Algonquin Park border, is a land rich with lakes, rivers and a lively history. Once considered as a possibility for a government Indian Reserve in the early 1800s, Almaguin became a centre for lumbering and ultimately a year-round mecca for outdoor enthusiasts.Almaguin: A Highland History offers a wide range of stories from the opening of t...

How did Florence Nightingale and Sir Alexander Mackenzie become part of the same family history? And how does Captain Booty Graves fit into the picture? Who was the well-respected doctor in London, Ontario, son of a Northwest partner and Metis mother, who married a grandniece of a British aristocrat? Who was the first Newfoundlander, the grandson of a merchant seaman, to become a member of the federal government?This is very much a Canadian story. What begins as research, by the da...

Reginald—better known as “Dutch”—Thompson is a multi-faceted storyteller with unforgettable voices—those of Roy from Murray Harbour North, Adelaide from Bunbury, Gus from Chepstow, and countless others—to tell the stories of the Bygone days in Prince Edward Island [sometimes NS, too]. Stories that, without Dutch’s talent and care, might be remembered only by family and close friends or lost altogether. Remember when the train ran from tip to tip and along all the small branches, taking goo...

"The author has imbued this book with magic charms, making it an adventuresome voyage through a sometimes entertaining, sometimes alarming, always fascinating, unfamiliar lost world, almost too fantastic to be real, and peopled with as many interesting characters as Alice in Wonderland." ~ Bob Anthony, author of Novus Mirabilis"This book was born from the stories my father told me and my adventure of growing up in a freer time. I realized from a young age how fortunate I had been t...

From prospectors to politicians, promoters to profiteers, New Westminster’s known them all. It is Western Canada’s oldest city, aptly named by Queen Victoria as the first capital of the new colony of British Columbia. On the mighty Fraser River, it has survived gold rushes, loss of capital status, fire, flood, the Depression, and two world wars. This collection of illuminating black and white photographs, artwork, and text shows how its tenacious citizens have thrived. It follows the city’...