Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

Discovering Lost Stories

Oct 5, 2015

Several years ago, in Geist magazine, I wrote a column about a pair of books on Acadian history, one of them by the Montreal historian Ronald Rudin. Just recently I've become aware of another project directed by Rudin, a website called Lost Stories. The project seeks out little-known stories from Canadian history and then commemorates them with "inexpensive, site-specific works of public art."

The first "lost story" recalls Thomas Widd, who founded a school for the deaf in Montreal in the late 19th century. If you go to the website you can watch a delightful video showing how the artist Lalie Douglas translated Widd's experience into a mural which was installed at the school.