Club members heard a presentation fromClub visit to Elgin County Heritage Centre and Museum
11 members and one guest met at the Centre this morning at 10:30 to be greeted by Mike Baker, curator.
Mike began his presentation with a brief summary of the new building and the variety of services now offered to our community. The staff works extensively with all the schools to arrange either a school visit to the Centre or for the staff to take programs to the schools. When the new building was being planned there was a hope that traffic to the museum and centre would increase and it has been successful. The number of visitors, enquiries and other types of contacts has doubled over previous years.
Mike spoke of the collections of artifacts from medieval times, suits of armour, weapons, antique tools for kitchen, farms and trade crafts. We saw colonial storage chests, clothing and much more.
The Centre has a fairly large collection of colonial artifacts. Mike spoke about the library of land registry documents from the early years settlement to mid-century. Thomas Talbot and the succession of Lords Elgin were prominent in the development of St. Thomas, Elgin County and much of the lands along the north shores of Lake Erie. During those busy times the justice system and court houses were built, local militias were established, with military training being mandatory. Many of those official buildings were replicas in part or entirely of buildings in England, Ireland and Scotland.
The final part of Mikes presentation dealt with our own Rotary archives. Thanks to several of our members we finally have most of our materials at the Centre where work is well under way to arrange them in proper order. The intent is to eventually have all the materials that meet the criteria be digitized and made available for online enquiries and studies. To that end Mike is hoping that the remaining dinasaur members of the club may be able to help to identify many of the people and events in all the old photos in the collections.
The excursion was a delight for all of us. We had many questions. A few of our members still have other materials from personal and family records that may help to fill some of the gaps in our records.
When Mike concluded his remarks Stew thanked him and his staff for welcoming us to this exciting presentation.
REPORT BY SUZANNE OF OUR HAPPY TIME AT MERRIVIEW FOLLOWING THE VISIT TO THE MUSEUM
Club President Gerry Jansen with new members 
Trudy and Brenda