For 143 years, The Equity has been the living memory of our community, documenting the births, deaths, triumphs, and trials of the Pontiac. Today, we are thrilled to invite you to step back in time through a major addition to our digital collections.
The Pontiac and the First World War is a special online feature that brings the history of WWI to your fingertips, powered by today’s technology.
A Modern Look at History
This project represents a unique marriage between the past and the present. We have curated over 2,000 pages of The Equity published during the war years and are making the entire collection available for download. Whether you are a researcher, a student, or a genealogy enthusiast, these period documents are now yours to explore and preserve.
Listen to History: The Podcast Experience
What makes this project truly special is the way we are sharing these narratives. We have divided the story into “Seasons,” each offering a deep dive into different chapters of the war.
To make this history more accessible, we used innovative AI technology to extract essential content from the newspaper’s dense columns. This information has been transformed into a series of 12 to 18-minute podcasts, allowing you to listen to the news, letters, and local chronicles exactly as they were shared over a century ago.
It is history you can listen to while having your morning coffee or driving in your car.
Explore and Download
We invite you to visit our new portal to:
- Browse by Season: Follow the timeline of the Great War through a local lens.
- Listen: Experience the AI-generated podcasts that tell our story.
- Download: Take all 2,000+ pages of The Equity with you in digital format.
Their commitment to preserving and highlighting the stories of English-speaking Quebec is the reason these archives are now accessible to everyone. We are incredibly grateful for this partnership, which helps us keep the history of the Pontiac alive for generations to come.nir.
We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN). This project was made possible through their generous funding, which provided the vital time and resources to digitize and develop this new way of experiencing our past.
