by Devon Blean
If you are a descendant of one of Bridgeland-Riverside’s older families, you might be interested in the Bridgeland-Riverside and Nose Creek one-place studies that have been started on WikiTree. This means that several people may be writing about the same person and adding or amending information. I started doing folks from Bridgeland-Riverside and Nose Creek about two and a half years ago and now have added hundreds of profiles of people who lived in the area, all documented with sources obtained from Ancestry, Familysearch, Newspapers.com, and Find A Grave.
Recently, the 1931 Canada census has appeared on Ancestry so that’s a help. Sometimes, I’ve been able to contact people on Ancestry who have allowed me to use their family photos. On occasion, there are useful photos found in the Glenbow Archives. Volunteers from the neighbourhood often go out to obtain photos of places where people lived if the houses still exist. And I have my own cache of neighbourhood photos from 2007 to 2009 that I took before we moved away to the west coast. How I wish I had taken more of peoples’ houses since so many have been torn down since that time.
I’ve been concentrating on the earliest settlers in an effort to recreate the neighbourhood in the 1910s and 1920s. Since there were so many marriages among the local residents, perhaps eventually, as other people add their family information, we shall get almost everyone who lived here at that time. Interestingly, just a few months ago, another person from Edmonton started a Boonie Doon one-place study. Already, we have found connections from Bridgeland to Edmonton.
You can google Bridgeland-Riverside Project WikiTree to see if your family members have had profiles written about them. I am always looking for more detailed family information in order to spark up the profiles and make them real biographies and not just a recitation of birth, marriage, and death dates like you see on Find A Grave. If you’re interested in working with me, please contact [email protected].
Click here to the Bridgeland Community News home page for the latest Bridgeland community updates.
