Welcome to Historius.ca

Background

In the old days of newspapers, it often became the job of new reporters to “go write up an obituary for that famous painter, or the mayor, or the local senator.” Of course, that was when newspapers had the resources to look forward ten or twenty years, or even longer. They could spend “people power” writing such stories, and archiving the stories for a long, long time down the road. Even if it sounds kind of morbid writing up obituaries, it was also a wonderful way for any journalist to expand his or her contacts, and get to know people they would never in all probability ever meet.

We have often thought such content would be a great addition to our own local newspapers. It would be a resource, an acknowledgement of people who have contributed much to our communities, plus, using expanded space in the online world, it can provide much more information than what we would find in the pages of our newspapers. Finally, Historius.ca is not a future ‘obituary’ although it definitely can be a helpful resource when that inevitable day comes.

We often call our newspapers, the “newspapers of record” for our communities. This is our intent, to provide a further “record” of our communities, beyond the day-to-day and week-to-week of who, what, where, when and why.

Guidelines for Contributions

You may have an interesting story. You may have a close friend, or a family member, you want to acknowledge here on historius.ca. Regularly in our partner newspapers, we feature condensed versions of our subject’s story. Both the expanded story here on historius.ca and the newspaper version take time. You can help considerably by writing the story yourself, leaving us with as little to edit as possible. If you want us to write the copy, we can make no promises of when it will be done, or how long it will take. Here are some guidelines of what we are looking for:

1) The subject will be 50 years or older.
2) The story will have several quotes from the subject.
3) The full story will roughly be about 3,000 to 5,000 words in length, or 17,000 to 25,000 characters.
4) We will condense the story to fit our real world publication. The full story will appear online.
5) We can use around 6 to 10 photos. They can be scanned in any of these formats:
6) Any photos cannot be larger than 1 Mb in size.
7) There is no fee or charge for preparing the initial publication, no charge for the in print copy, and no charge for publishing online. If down the road, you want to add or edit the online content, there will be hourly fees payable in advance for this.
8) The story will be about the subject, the subject’s family, his or her career paths, achievements, and the circumstances and life in his or her community. Basically, “the life and times of …..”
9) There is no need the subject be of any particular prominence, or have made any notable achievements. That said, we are confident there are always such things about people if one looks hard enough.