As well as Family Day in the province of Ontario, it is also Heritage Day in Canada.
February 18 kicks off a week of celebrating our heritage in Ontario, according to Ontario Heritage Trust.
The site offers online exhibitions, including about John Graves Simcoe.
A blog reader was astute in noting 2013 is the 220th year since the official founding of London.
Simcoe traveled most of February from Newark to Detroit and reached the Forks of the Thames on his return trip in March.
It was in 1793 that Simcoe chose the Forks as the future capital of Upper Canada. It didn’t come to pass.
Still we have a lot of history to celebrate in London and in Ontario.
If you want to check out the Heritage Trust site, here is the link. http://www.heritagetrust.on.ca
Happy Heritage Day (week) and Family Day.
What will you be doing on the holiday?
Our family is probably going to take in the South East Winter Fest with free activities at the Youth For Christ centre on Adelaide St. S and free skating at the Glen Cairn arena.
Isle of Rumleski 
A “Heritage Day” was promoted by Heritage Canada foundation by the mid 1970s.
(Pierre Berton was the celebrity trying to get official “Day” recognition, resulting in
some unions building a paid day off into contracts. (In an home for the aged, one
would find the recreation staff person off-duty at a time when focus should have
been on the heritage of the long-lived residents. At one home when voluntary
effort set up a Monday Day, it was reported that a lady who’d never said a word
socially, shyly showed staff a book she had published on the history of her own
province.
Ontario solved the time problem in 1986 backing the long-needed Week period,
to allow Groups interested in specific fields of heritage study to make presentations.
It’s slowed down, but worth a look to see what Historical Society and Architectural
Conservancy have planned for “Ontario Heritage Week 2013”.
Family Day might be a good one to focus on your own family’s “heritage”. How
and when and why did the first ancestors cross the ocean to establish your
roots in the new world ..If first generation, start recording the facts of what
drew your group to Canada – and maybe what drove them away from the
old homeland.
Lots of local history if one takes the trouble to look for record of it. A start
is visiting, in person or online, the OHF blue freestanding, and HS&MBC
maroon affixed one, and the many little blue Library Sites Committe ones.
Read them in sequence starting with the one next posted here. Look for
a couple of errors – part of the fun in this is finding conflicting information
and trying to find out which is accurate.
[Founding of London]
[In 1793, Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe reserved the site at the forks of
the Thames River for the capital of Upper Canada. York (Toronto)
became the seat of government, however, and the town site of London
began to develop only after 1826 when it was selected as the judicial
and administrative centre of the London District.]
Location: northeast corner of Court House Square,
Dundas and Ridout Streets, London
erected by Ontario in the 1950s
– related are the OHF one down at town of Vittoria, where courthouse
fire of 1825 suggesting moving the courts inland, away from the American
threat, and chosing the land Reserve Col. Lt. Gov Simcoe had created all
those years ago.
also the Fed. HS&MBC one on the old court house lawn, also there
over half a century with a glaring date error.