WALKING THROUGH THE STREETS - PROPERTIES and PEOPLE

Joseph Masters was the Town Clerk and Treasurer of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario from 1929 to 1944 and a writer by avocation. Born in the town on August 14th, the son of Joseph and Margaret Masters, he grew up in the Dock Area. He was educated at the old elementary school on Platoff Street during famed Niagara-on-the-Lake historian Janet Carnochan's last year as Principal, then at the high school that is now part of the Niagara Historical Museum on Gage Street.

Local historian and writer Maggie Parnall has compiled several books for the Jordan Historical Museum of the Twenty, including Pioneer and Mennonite Cookbook, Schools and Education [Town of Lincoln], and the Michener Family History done in calligraphy for Roland Michener. She has also compiled The Mini-Atlas of Early Settlers in the District of Niagara, 1784 - 1876, The Wentworth County Mini-Atlas of Early Settlers, 1791 - 1875, and Black History in the Niagara Peninsula. She is currently at work on Grantham Ancestors and Louth Ancestors.

Working from the barely-legible carbon copy pages [detail on the left], Ms. Parnall painstakingly transcribed all of Joseph Masters' articles to computer file and then organized them chronologically, making this web publishing procedure infinitely more manageable.

Mr. Masters' articles are written in a relaxed, breezy, informal conversational style; except for correcting spelling and obvious structural or syntactic errors, I have left his words pretty much as they first appeared in print. I have the sense he knew his audience and wrote to them rather than for them, as if he was relating things to one person, a friend: sitting in a rocking chair in front of McClelland's store, pipe dangling from his mouth, dog lazing at his feet, reminiscing aloud with a whiskered smile, a knowing nod, a sly wink. His memory and storytelling ability are a marvel: he recreates the small town world with the same picaresque brush as Thornton Wilder, with the same lively and enchanting result.

This sends you to significant related areas within Masters' massive reminiscences. When you pass your cursor over an active link window, the cursor changes to a hand. Your cursor will remain unchanged over inactive windows.

Underlined links appear frequently and are always related to names and families, for further reference. The family page will be accessed this way without frames, but appears without the surname index. You can use your browser's FIND command to further search out a name or any other text.