Take a trip to the county's past during Archives Awareness Week

FERGUS – Whether it's wanting to know your roots, or where you're setting your roots, you can learn a lot from archives.

The Wellington County Archives is putting a focus on the history collected within their walls for Archives Awareness Week, which runs April 3 to April 6.

Tours are running during the week at the Wellington County Museum and Archives on Wellington Road 18, with no appointment necessary.

"Rather than being historians, we're keepers of the record," said county archivist Karen Wagner.

"It's our job to collect all the records that we can that tell us about history in the distant past for Wellington County."

She said collecting pieces from the past is part of its mandate, but they have also been collecting a lot more current records because of the pandemic.

Wagner said preserving things for future generations is also important because many times, she said she's heard from people coming in that they wish they spoke to their grandparents more about history.

"It tends to be not until people have passed on that they think about their history or their families history," she said. "And of course some of that history is lost, so we're trying to collect records to preserve that history for future generations."

There's a rich history. From newspapers, to photographs, microfilm, video, property and transaction records, ancestry information, attendance records for schools, diaries, private collections, maps and much more.

The storage vault, which they've occupied since June 2010, has wall-to-wall coverage of these pieces of local history. Space was running out on the second floor of the museum, so the archives got a larger room

"Right now, our archives is very much paper-based, but COVID has taught us that born-digital records is really something that archivists are really going to be dealing with going forward, and the importance of each individual thing," Wagner said. "How they're going to organize and save those photographs that they are taking today for future generations."

The County of Wellington got started as a municipality in the late 1830s with the District of Wellington. It became a county in 1854.

But she said the archives have records from the Town of Erin dating back to 1819, as well as Elora and Fergus in the early 1830s.

And there's also items early settlers brought with them from other countries to consider as part of records.

"One of the oldest records we have here happens to be a Bible that we have from Sweden, which I think dates back to the 1500's, which a family brought with them," Wagner said.

The archives are open from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. during the week, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. You can also ask for a tour beyond this special week.

Wagner said residents are welcome to drop by at any point to check out the history, whether it's to do research or to pique someone's curiosity.

And when you're finished a tour, Wagner hopes residents think about the importance of archives, what they're collecting for their own family archives and what they want to pass to the next generation.