Marking History – The History of Deep Cove
When you talk about history most people think, American history or world history. However, history is a process of interpretation and taking perspective but most importantly, understanding that history can be as small as a single-family. Welcome to my Marking History reflective blog post!
Driving Question:
How can we as historians uncover and share stories about our community?
Like our driving question implies, we as historians set to uncover and share stories from our Deep Cove community. In partnership with the Deep Cove Heritage Society, our grade 11/12 class worked together to revamp the Deep Cove historical walking tour. We created a pamphlet and a custom google map!
The Pamphlet
The Google Map
With the new quarterly school system in place, I’m taking two courses for 10 weeks and then switching to another two. This happens 4 times throughout the year. PLP has adapted well and is managing to keep things interesting. For these past five weeks, we’ve been working on a project called Marking History. I have to say, it’s been the perfect starter project to adjust to such a short work period. Doing a class project allows you to focus on your own work while still contributing to a bigger product. To complete this project we were split into two groups, the eagles (in charge of the google map creation) and the wolves (in charge of the pamphlet creation).
Contributions
As a member of the eagles group, (the cool kids who came to school Tuesday and Thursday) I along with other Eagles members was tasked with making our Google Map. Each person in the class, wolves and eagles had a stop on the walking tour they had to write about (21 stops in total). Our job as the google map curators was to take everyone’s write-ups and make that google map pop!
The Moore Family Home
Like I said at the beginning of this post, history can be as small as one family and that’s the information I tried to contribute to our walking tour! My stop (stop #2) on the walking tour tells you all about Deep Cove’s first permanent residents, the Moore family. As a historian, it was my job to take historical perspective and tell you just how important the Moore family was to the development of Deep Cove and its history today. My historical marker description includes two written narratives; one for the google map and one for the pamphlet. The google map also includes an auditorial walkthrough and a digital enhancement.
Written Narratives
Auditorial Walkthrough
Digital Enhancement
The Creation Process
We were limited to 150 words for the pamphlet and 300 words google map so writing the narratives wasn’t too time-consuming. We were also working with some great resources, Echoes Across The Inlet and Echoes Across Seymour which were filled with wonderful histories of the Deep Cove and Seymour area. There were so many moving pieces in this project that I had to do a lot of revisions. Revising word count and making sure my texts included more than one historical perspective were the two biggest ones.
My idea for the digital enhancement came to me pretty easily. Because the Moore family rowed a boat filled with all their belonging from Vancouver to Deep Cove, I thought it would be meaningful to make a timeline with the theme of rowing a boat between the two locations. I believe my design process showcased my ability to create a more engaging text which was a crucial takeaway from the overall learning.
My role for the google map creation was route planner. I was in charge of creating each pin and the route people would take during the tour. I quickly learned while creating the google map route that the program we were using wouldn’t allow me to make 21 stops on the route, which was the number of stops we needed. In the end, we decided to scratch the route idea and stick to markers on the map. My classmate Adlih later discovered that we could make custom icons for the stops which had been a previous problem we faced. This meant I could create the numbered icons you see on the map now. I spent a good amount of time creating individual PNGs for the stops, all different colours and numbers (obviously). My desktop was quite cluttered after that but I think it was well worth it and gave our google map a deserved aesthetic.
I think my biggest strength during this project was trying to look for ways to help the project where it was needed. We were on such a tight schedule that I didn’t want to do my part and call it quits. I was always asking Emily, our lead curator if there were ever ways I could help and I think it benefited the final product as well as my own learning during the project. My biggest weakness was not diving deeper into my story. The Moore family’s story isn’t very broad and I felt like I hit a roadblock early on. Next time I do a research project like this, I won’t just limit myself to telling the story at face value but instead, do some even deeper research into the impact it had on modern-day.
In conclusion…
This project taught me to step back and look at history from a non-biased lens and overcome my current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand people in the past. My digital enhancement, written narratives and auditorial walkthrough gave me the opportunity to sharpen my skills by creating engaging and meaningful texts. It was really refreshing to focus on something so close to home instead of learning about world histories that I generally feel disconnected from. I hope to revisit the Marking History project in the fourth quarter so that I can work on my shortcomings and become a stronger historian!
