The Sylvan Lake District and Archives has officially gone online.
So far there has been a very positive response from people about the website, archives office manager Christina Lust said.
“To date the response has been very positive as people can now do some of their own research. It is still early days, and we are hoping as we promote the site through Facebook and other avenues we can make more people aware of the site.”
The non-profit group which has been operating for over 35 years has over 7,600 records and 12,000 images dating back to the 1900s in its database which are being uploaded online. The website launched March 27 and can be found at https://archives.sylvanlake.ca/
“We wanted to be more proactive in making our collection available to the public. With the advances in technology, it has allowed us to be able to move in this direction.”
The technology comes a price which the town was very supportive in helping us with, Lust said.
“The Town of Sylvan Lake has been very supportive in providing additional funding that allowed us to move our database to the cloud and subsequently allowed us to create the online site with the company that provides the licensing for our database.”
New information gets added regularly as donations and requests for additional information are made, Lust said.
“We often get requests from people who have lived in Sylvan Lake, spent their summers in Sylvan Lake or people looking to find more information about family members.”
Sylvan Lake District and Archives will hold its annual general meeting, April 25, with guest speaker Michael Dawe.
“Michael Dawe is a well-known Central Alberta historian and regular columnist in one of the weekly publications. He is quite familiar with Sylvan Lake’s history as his family had a cottage at the lake for many years and he served on the Norglenwold Summer Village council for a number of years.”
The meeting will be held on the lower flower of the Municipal Government Building 5012 48 Ave. at 1 p.m. It is open to anyone interested.
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