Presented by Kyla Ubbink A photograph tells a thousand tales, but only if it’s subject matter can be identified, and it has been given the...
Explore Ottawa's rich history on line or in person.
Stony Monday riot, the rabid Duke of Richmond, rowdy lumberjacks and eccentric geniuses. . . Ottawa's history is anything but boring! And OPL is the place to find out all about it. Our local history collections tell the stories of the people, customs, and institutions that built Ottawa and the surrounding communities.
Reference materials, including books, newspapers, directories, and municipal reports, can be consulted at Main, Nepean Centrepointe, or Beaverbrook branches. In addition, OPL is pleased to house the collections of 3 local history societies. Find out more about these collections here.
And, of course, the most popular local history titles are available to borrow at many branches. Together, OPL's local history collections provide an extensive resource on Ottawa and the surrounding area, past and present.
Events
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Saturday Sep 23, 2023 at 2:00pm -
Saturday Oct 21, 2023 at 1:00pmBeginning with the ancient Indigenous inhabitants of the Ottawa Valley and Bytown's earliest natural history societies, Randy Boswell explores our evolving relationship with the wildlife... -
Saturday Nov 4, 2023 at 1:00pmThe 1960s, a time when civic leaders were anxious to bulldoze the past to make way for modern thruways and dazzling glass towers of the...
Blogs
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Jul 18, 2022This summer, with gas prices and wanting new adventures closer to home, I decided...
Online resources
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This digitized full-images archives of the Ottawa Citizen provides genealogists, researchers and general public with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
This will allow Ottawans to digitally travel back through the centuries to become eyewitnesses to our local history.
Coverage is from 1845 to 2010, but you can access more recent full text content from September 1985 until now from Canadian Major Dailies ProQuest (Formerly Canadian Newsstand).
