Welcome to the Deeds/Nations
Site. This site provides you access to an
electronic version of the Greg Curnoe 1996 publication, Deeds/Nations, published
by the London Chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society.
This posthumous volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project Greg undertook in the last couple of years leading up to his death. Greg, an internationally renowned Canadian artist, had always been interested in the world around him in London, Ontario, and going beyond the conventional. So when he became interested in tracing the history of his property on the south bank of the Thames River, he was not interested in just tracing this history back to the Crown patent issued for the property in the early 19th Century. He wanted to know the archaeological history of the property, and he wanted to know much more about the people and Nations represented on the various British treaties that were signed surrendering the land to the British, which encompassed his own parcel of land. To do this, Greg began to search every historical source he could get his hands on, published and manuscript, and began compiling a list of the people he came across in those sources, cross-listing the same names that appeared in multiple sources. The result of this effort is the massive directory of people listed in the publication - biographies of people who helped shaped our past, but who had remained anonymous until Greg's simple act of tracing their documented lives. Please see the original FORWARD and PREFACE to the volume for more information about Greg's project and the history contained in this directory.
With the assistance of the London Chapter, OAS, and the generosity of Adams Heritage, researchers now can access this wealth of data electronically, and search the database for particular individuals, Nations, treaties, places, etc. However, it would be wrong to think of this site as a simple reproduction of Deeds/Nations. We hope that this site can serve as a central repository for such research, and thus expand the database to include many more individuals, or revised information on the people already listed. And while Greg's work focused on the communities of southwestern Ontario, there is no reason why this database cannot expand to include individuals and communities from throughout the Great Lakes basin and beyond.
So we would encourage you to feel free to submit new entries or additional information on people already listed. As submissions arrive, they will be added to the database in the following way: New entries or additional information will appear as blue text in the database. Entries that challenge the current biography for an individual and offer a differing interpretation will appear in red. At the end of the new entry, with submitter's permission, will appear their initials (NF). An index of these initials will be maintained, along with the submitter's e-mail address, so that people can talk to each other about their sources, or discuss differing understanding of who people were. If people are agreeable, we can post these discussions so multiple people can help sort out a puzzle or apparent contradiction in the historical data.
We also hope to incorporate more totems from historical documents, various historical documents themselves, and other graphics that can assist in understanding who people were and who their communities were. It is our hope that this database will grow with individual contributions, so that researchers will not re-invent the wheel every time they look at the same documents someone else looked at earlier. And, with searchable capacity, it will be possible to for researchers, communities, families and anyone else interested in the past to quickly learn about the people who shaped that past.
Neal Ferris
August 21, 2001
To make submissions to the database please send your electronic material to Neal Ferris at 55 Centre Street, London, Ontario N6J 1T4, or by e-mail to neal.ferris@mcl.gov.on.ca. Please include a phone number and e-mail address so we can contact you if we have problems with the format your data has come in. Please also indicate whether or not you would like your name and e-mail address listed next to your contributions.