ABOUT US
The Kingston Greek History Project is an effort of the Greek Community of Kingston to collect the stories of its members, and to preserve both our present and our past for years to come. We are passionate about displaying our community’s rich history to the broader public as well as to future generations; and we are excited to be compiling a digital archive of interviews, photos, and documents so that they may be preserved even longer.
We were grateful to have received a grant for the second phase of our project by the City of Kingston Heritage Fund Project Grant, allowing us to expand our outreach and our archives even further in 2018-2019. Our work from this phase – composed of our interviews, archival research, and more – is now displayed on both this website and is hosted on Queens’ STONES Walking Tour Website (http://www.stoneskingston.ca/greek-history). The website serves as a platform for us to pinpoint locations on a map which are important to Kingston’s Greek history, and to explore the themes and stories surrounding each location through the mediums of text, audio, and visual (documents and photos). We were excited to have Angeline Antonakos Boswell working on this phase of the project as our Researcher. The project is led by George Katinas and Paula Antonakos.
Please visit the archives hosted on this website and on archive.org, as well as the Story of Our Community written during the 2018-2019 phase of this project.
OUR HISTORY
This inaugural phase of the project was funded by a City of Kingston Heritage Fund Project Grant 2016-2017, whereby $11,500 was awarded to the Kingston Greek Community. On March 19th Father Demetre made an announcement about the launch of the Kingston Greek History project (KGHP). Later the same day, George Katinas and Paula Antonakos also spoke briefly about the project. Kingston Greek History Project involves the collection of stories from members of our community in order to create a record of the lives of Greek Canadians in Kingston. The stories of the members of our community were recorded during one to one Oral History interviews. Photos and documents were scanned and collected, and all archival information was donated to Queen’s University Archives and Kingston Frontenac Public Library. We made a large contribution, including over 200 photos and interviews with 20 community members! This inaugural phase was continued into the second phase (2018-2019), which lead us to the completion of the Story of Our Community, the acquiring of even more photo, audio, and video archives, and the hosting of our history on STONES.
DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE?
The Kingston Greek History Project’s acquiring of archival data is on pause following the completion of our 2018-2019 project.
If you have something to contribute to our archival collection, we encourage you to post here. This Facebook platform is meant to be a space where anyone can share any photos, documents, information, videos, or anything else pertinent to Greek History in Kingston! This is a collaborative space where we can engage with one another in keeping the history of the Greeks in Kingston alive.
If you are from the Kingston Greek Community and would like to volunteer your time to collect interviews and scan documents from your family members or other members in the community and do not have the resources to do so, please contact us to request access to our equipment. Please volunteer to speak on behalf of your parents, aunts and uncles or grandparents, if they are unable to do so. We would love to help you digitize old pictures and items of importance to them. We are interested in also hearing from Greeks who arrived later and from different areas of Greece and the world as well as the most recent Greek and non-Greek members to arrive to make this community their home. How wonderful this would be to have your stories archived so that hundreds of years from now, others can know about our history here in Kingston?
Do you want to read the full story of our community in a printable PDF format?
Click HERE to Download.
Kingston Greek History Project 