Cathy Wilson shares her recent book, Being Neighbours about barn raisings and quilting bees in Ontario, 1830-1960. Employing farm diaries, she takes the audience into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of the labour exchange, their workways, feasts, and hospitality to uncover the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, their relationships, and ways of managing conflict and crisis. The diaries she used in researching this work included Huron County farm families. 

Catharine Wilson is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Guelph. She is the Founder and Director of the Rural Diary Archive, https://ruraldiaries.lib.uoguelph.ca/ and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her recent book, Being Neighbours is the study of quilting and barn-raising bees and appeared in Fall 2022, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. 

This talk is included with regular admission to the Huron County Museum (FREE with your Huron County Library card or membership).