Preserving Our Heritage

Canada 150 is a national, not-for-profit campaign to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday in 2017 by encouraging the recording and collecting of life stories, family histories as well as community and organization histories.

We have created a Canada 150 guide, Recording Your Life Story or Family Stories. It is designed to encourage Canadians to record their stories as a gift to Canada. We encourage and support individuals and groups to donate these records to Library and Archives Canada as either a book, video or audio tape, a multi-media format or as a copy of a web site. These donations will be stored by the library for future generations  and descendants to use and enjoy.

The goals of the Canada 150 program are:

1. 1.To retain our wealth of oral and written history for generations to come
   

2. 2.To provide a family legacy for generations to come
   

3. 3.To improve understanding within families and communities through the mutual exchange of stories
   

4. 4.To enhance Canadian unity through a sense of national pride and a more profound celebration of the contributions of Canadians from diverse backgrounds
   

5. 5.To provide a rich primary resource of Canadian history for future research and analysis.
   

The collection includes a wide variety of materials and projects:

1. 1.An individual's personal stories
   

2. 2.Family stories, histories and genealogies
   

3. 3.Neighbourhood, community, municipality, county and regional histories
   

4. 4.Corporate histories
   

5. 5.Stories and histories from faith communities and their places of worship
   

6. 6.Histories of social clubs, associations, universities and colleges, arts and sports groups.
   

The minimum requirements for eligibility are that the materials, in whatever form, must be of sufficient quality to warrant legal deposit in the Library and Archives Canada. The work is a legacy you are leaving to future Canadian generations. Eligibility criteria are available from Library and Archives Canada. Specifically for Legal Deposit information go to this page. For electronic publishing, go to this page. You will find at their website that you are legally bound to deposit all types of publications in all types of formats. The original legislation, which applied primarily to books, was extended to include serial publications in 1965, sound recordings in 1969, multi-media kits in 1978, microforms in 1988, CD-ROMs and video recordings in 1993, and electronic publications on all types of physical formats in 1995.

When Library and Archives Canada talks about "publishers" it includes: "all individuals, associations, federal government departments and agencies, trade and periodical publishers, and publishers of audio, video, multimedia, microforms and electronic publications issued in physical formats."

Canada 150 is a not-for-profit project founded by Harry van Bommel and coordinated by Legacies Inc. Corporate, organizational and individual sponsors are encouraged to support our efforts in promoting the project.