Finding lost Ottawa - Ottawa Parenting Times Magazine

A hyperlocal website has sparked the interests of history buffs everywhere. Sheryl Bennett-Wilson looks back

The cover of Lost Ottawa. Photo Courtesy David McGee

The internet was just getting started when Canadian David McGee was working at MIT in Boston in 1997.

Even then, says McGee, “I wondered how it would change the writing of history. He returned to Canada in 2008 and was digitizing photos at the Canada Science and Technology Museum when he became responsible for the archival remains of the E.B. Eddy Company—a pulp and paper company and the longest-running industry in the history of the city.

“I thought, surely there is a book on the Eddy Company,” says McGee, who holds a PhD in the history of science and technology from the University of Toronto, “but there wasn’t.” Up until then, there had only been three books published about the city of Ottawa in 50 years. “I guess publishers figured they wouldn’t make any money on a history book,” says McGee, “but are people not interested in history?”

The online aspect of Facebook was exactly what he needed. “When my wife and I posted a picture of the Green Valley Restaurant, the number of likes exploded to over 16,000. And that’s when we knew that people did like their history.” As McGee points out, people find it hard to relate to ‘formal’ history. “What people liked was the fact they could connect with the photo,” says McGee. “They can say ‘I’ve been there’ or ‘my parents took me there,’ and it’s not just nostalgia. Something about the photo reached them.”

Between 2013 and 2021, they posted two times a day and had posted over 16,500 photos. “We were exhausted,” says McGee. They also found, like many people, that Facebook had become frustrating with the restrictions they had put in place. The page was reaching fewer and fewer people even though they had thousands of followers. “The first book came from that frustration,” says McGee. “But we also felt we should preserve the history that people had shared with us. So many of the comments people had made were so touching.”

McGee also thought it was a good way to give back to the community. He took the best comments from his Facebook page and added them to the photos to make it a fun read. The first “Lost Ottawa” book, published in 2017, was successful, says McGee, “becoming the biggest selling local history book across the country. We sold over 20,000 copies. The second and third books did well, but not like the first one.” McGee says he still has a lot of material and that book four is a possibility.

He would like Lost Ottawa to become a part of the city archives. If you provide history in a fun way, people do like it and enjoy it, he says, adding, “I learned a lot about people doing this. Most satisfying, from a historian’s perspective, is that Lost Ottawa encouraged other communities to investigate their history online. In our own little way, we helped make history.”