In the middle of a family Zoom call, someone asked if anyone had seen the “trunk of letters” that Eleanor Thompson had saved throughout her long life. The people on the call had no idea how far down the rabbit hole this innocent question was about to take them.

This session chronicles how a dedicated team of family researchers is collaborating to preserve, understand, and share 7000 pages of family and cultural history found in an attic in southern Ontario in 2020.

The case study also describes how the family is passing along the life and times of their ancestors to a new generation, revealing the texture of life in rural Ontario from the 1920s through World War II.