Whether on vacation or close to home, it is rewarding to research and visit historical properties in your area. Fortunately, due to the hard work of dedicated community volunteers, professional historians, and those in government there are great resources to do this in your community. A good starting place is to the
Canada's Historic Places website. To start your search use the Search tab at the top of the page, and then on the subsequent page just enter a province and town/city on the right and press the search button (there are other options including type of building/activity or entering the first three characters of the Canadian postal code, for example). For Sackville, NB when I searched on Jan. 2, 2012 this generated a listing of 51 places. Each has a link with detailed information. When you click on an item in the list a red icon will appear on the map (e.g. in the accompanying image I selected Tonge's Island National Historic site. A useful book, available as a free pdf written by Environment Canada Parks Service, is
The Buildings of Canada. This provides sketches of different architectural styles for houses, churches, barns and more, and will help you to spot historically important structures not yet in the website (coverage across the country is quite variable). The good folks at the
Tantramar Heritage Trust have made the job even easier for those in the Sackville, NB area. From their website a selection of Tantramar Historic Sites will show them on a map, along with images and detailed descriptions of each. One feature I particularly like is that they provide a list that is divided by century, which makes it easy, for example, to find 19th century architecture. While a number of the entries are naturally enough historic locations, churches and institutional buildings, and commercial buildings, there are a large number of residential homes in the list as well. In the next posting of this blog I will tell you about a historic Sackville house that is for sale right now.
