Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: The Interwar Years (review)

Françoise Noël’s study of family and community life during the interwar period in Northeastern Ontario, an area that includes the settlements that extended from the Quebec border at Mattawa to Lake Nipissing at North Bay, is fascinating and thorough and makes a significant contribution to this understudied region as well as to the history of childhood, gender, religion, family, and leisure. Both scholars and general readers who have an interest in this region and the various fields touched upon will appreciate this work.

Viewing family and community as categories of analysis, Noël gives readers a sense of the daily rhythms of life for ordinary folk, moving seamlessly between their public and private experiences, which, as she makes clear, were affected by class, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, age, and the urban and rural settings in which the people lived. The interplay between family and community, and the identities that resulted, varied from person to person. Noël explores this notion in depth through discussions on happenstance in the home and in community institutions and spaces. Employing a micro-history approach, Noël’s work speaks to the importance of regionalism while delineating national patterns of experience, belonging, and identity.

Although Noël is not a community insider, she grounded her work in oral history interviews that she conducted with those who grew up in Northeastern Ontario during the 1920s and 1930s. Rigorously researched, the book also is based on census data, local newspaper articles and public announcements, letters, diaries, and other regional sources. Certainly, when Noël privileges memory over these other sources, she offers an intimate view of this place and its people.

A story told from anglophone, francophone, and ethnic (predominantly Italian) recollections, this is a rich and diverse history of the social processes that sustained family and community. After providing a brief description of the region, and the ways that natural resources drove its development and led mostly Ontario-born citizens of British and French-Canadian origins to settle there, Noël introduces us to three families that are representative of residents. As readers ‘meet’ Loretta Cundari, Rita Landriault, and Clifford T. Alger, they soon appreciate the real ways that ethnicity, class, gender, age, and religion affected the lives of these individuals. While Loretta describes her working-class Italian upbringing, Rita speaks about her French-Canadian identity, and Clifford remembers his childhood growing up in a ‘Canadian’ home with his Irish grandparents living next door. While these and other interviewees tell their personal stories about domestic strategies, family celebrations, and rite-of-passage rituals in the home and the church, experiences in schools, playgrounds, and on neighbourhood streets, at recreational events, and community functions held by voluntary associations and festivals like North Bay’s Old Home Week, Noël effectively demonstrates the personal ways in which community and family were connected. Through these memories, she also points out the Depression’s impact on the region, noting that those who lived in rural areas remained relatively unaffected by the economic collapse while those who lived in urban communities had a diversity of experiences. Noël’s inclusion of letters that children wrote to Santa Claus is particularly interesting, as she reads between the lines to reveal inadequacies at home and in the community. Through this source, and others, readers may view the interwar period from a child’s perspective.

While Noël’s use of the forty-three interviews that she conducted is impressive, the study would have benefited from a more focused and comprehensive analysis of the oral narratives. The strength of this book rests in its inclusion of personal stories; they make for a compelling and rich social history of Northeastern Ontario. That said, Noël uses a variety of sources and, at times, these stories get lost in the details that she provides; chapters that do not use oral history also...