What is this all about?

I caught the digital historian flu not long after the birth of the internet and spent the next twenty-five years researching my family tree. Surprisingly, this journey led me to my own back door in British Columbia. While digging up the paper trails of my elusive ancestors, I developed a keen interest in local history and encountered many interesting and unrelated stories. Some are funny, some are inspiring, and many read like a gripping novel. The ones that I share here are short-story versions. These short stories, and the thousands of others I may never find the time to write, form the foundation of the places I love on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, and sometimes beyond. Like the rivers and lakes across North America, where early tribes and explorers would meet to exchange information - directions, weather, what they knew of local news and news from abroad - newspapers of the past were like the internet of the time, where the information was raw and often left unedited and unchecked. Sometimes knowing which writer and newspaper had reported the story is just as interesting as the story itself. I hope you follow along and enjoy these amusing and mildly entertaining clips from these old newspapers and other data sources from around the world. You might find, like I did, that Vancouver Island and the province of British Columbia are very special places.

This site is in no way politically driven. Old newspaper coverage of the area, the primary source of these stories, is often filled with writings from a very biased or colonial perspective. It's just how it was in their time, and it can be a challenge to read, even for the purpose of research, and many stories should be taken with a grain of salt. However, even with their antiquated views, old newspapers remain the primary source of historical data, to which one can apply modern tools to lead to truths. If you can accept that I do my best to protect my readers from the worst of it, and respect that this is simply storytelling of bygone days, then I hope you are entertained and not offended. It is sincerely not my intent to do so. History is like a moving target, and I don't always hit the mark, but I try.

Thank you for your support, corrections, contributions, likes, follows and shares. It's been fun, and I'm happy to finally launch my site.

🚂 Papertown Conductor, April 2, 2022

"Blog in the Works!" "I have a blog that I will one day use to tell these stories in greater detail. A Christmas 2020 launch, maybe." 🚂 Papertown Conductor (First Post on Facebook Page, December 31, 2019)