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detective NEW!!! can you help? I'm trying to assemble a Saskatchewan WWI honour roll
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What is People Places? PEOPLE PLACES sprang from my hobby. Many years ago I became interested in the
postal history of Saskatchewan and got myself addicted to Saskatchewan
postmarks. It was my objective to
collect an envelope with a legible postmark on it from each of the almost
3,000 post offices which have operated at one time or another in the
province. I mount my collection in 3-ring binders and like
to include maps to show where the particular post office is or was. Very early I ran into problems because
information was not readily available on the precise locations of many
offices. I got access to a card file
listing all the POs, their dates of operation, locations and the names of the
postmasters. Using DataEase, I built a
database and transferred all the information into my computer. Gaps remained – there were still about 100 POs whose locations were missing or less than certain. But my experience with rural education told me that for every one of the 3,000 POs in Saskatchewan there was most likely a country school in the neighbourhood with the same name. So, phase two was to research school records at the Education department and to get the names, locations and dates of operation of the almost 6,000 schools into my computer. By this time I had a fairly sizable database, and I kept adding to it – information on cities, towns and villages, resorts, parks, First Nations, community pastures, rail lines, etc., etc. As I added data, I also kept coming across interesting bits of history about the origins of names, and these also found their way into PEOPLE PLACES: The Historical Gazetteer of Saskatchewan. That led to my column on CBC Radio which ran for more than 6 years. Of course, doing a radio column means writing scripts, and a pile of scripts pretty soon starts to look like a book! Go ahead, check out the Books page.
My early research reflected the title of my first five books - people places, i.e., the settled parts of the province. In more recent years I have added in all the geographic features (lakes, rivers, creeks, hills, coulees and so on) that can be found in the Gazetteer of Canada: Saskatchewan - and local feature names as well. That has meant that Geographic Names of Saskatchewan, my most recent book, is a huge expansion, containing 15,000+ names, almost four times as many as my earlier Dictionary.
Nor is the work anywhere near complete. My guess is that there are close to 10,000 more names for which there simply is no information on their origin in the files of the Geographic Names Board of Saskatchewan. There may be some stories in the files of the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names at Ottawa, but gaining access to them is very difficult. It is to be hoped that Ottawa's files will soon be made available to Saskatchewanians, in Saskatchewan, so that we can make our names story as complete as possible.
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