Robert B. Townsend
In 1989 Dr. Bryan Kerman, a research oceanographer, sought out a number of individuals to assist him in promoting the building of a replica of a ship of His Majesties Provincial Marine, Canada's Navy on the Great Lakes in the early 1800s, in time for the bi-centenary of the founding of the Province of Ontario, 1992.
I was invited to join the group because of my involvement with the sailing community, and because, at the time, I was leading a campaign at Toronto's Harbourfront to save Maple Leaf Quay as a nautical centre, and not as a seaquarium
In all 5 individuals met on an infrequent basis. It was felt, quite rightly, that having a replica of a vessel, such as the Prince Regent (which was the first naval vessel to be built in Toronto, (1812) would be a great asset to the City and to the Province. My prime involvement, at first, was to draft the basis of an organization to be called the "Marine Heritage Society of Ontario".
By the time the proposal for incorporation was prepared Dr. Kerman had taken a sabbatical to Cambridge University in England, and the other individuals involved disappeared. (We were told that one, an engineer was in gaol). At the last meeting of the group, Don Withrow, a retired Optometrist and past commodore of an organization called the "Provincial Marine, 1812" Joined the group. The two of us carried on the objectives of the Marine Heritage Society of Ontario (which was never formally incorporated. We completely lost track of the others who had shown initial interest.
We made several presentation to the City of Toronto and to the Crombie Commission investigating the needs of Harbourfront.
One of the suggestions that stirred interest in the original group at its last meeting was the possible publication of SCHOONER DAYS, C.H.J. SNIDERS over 1300 weekly columns which appeared int Toronto Telegram from 1932 to 1957.
Dr. Kerman, just before he left for Cambridge, suggested that a useful project would be to catalogue the names and information of the hundreds of vessels, the people who sailed them, and the names of the ports they sailed out of, on computer software for the use of future researchers, and to facilitate the eventual publication of Schooner Days, as had been the intention of C.H.J. SNIDER.
Don Withrow and myself obtained hard copy of nearly all of the Schooner days articles, divided them into packages of 25, and then passed them out to friends, relatives, and organizations such as the Provincial Marine, 1812, Shellbacks Club, and the Toronto (Central) Lions Club, with the request that they circle in Red ink the names of ships, underline in Red the type of vessel, when and where built, by whom, when and where lost, names of builders and captains, underlined in green and blue the place names, peoples names, events and illustrations, based solely on the information contained in the article. We then devised a form that this information could be recorded.
The system, and the form, was a little too fluid in the beginning, but eventually became more or less standard.
When a number of the forms had been completed I arranged for my Daughter-in-law, Evelyn Townsend, to purchase a suitable computer programme to record the information. On our behalf she purchased a Xerox software programme, FORMBASE 1.1 windows edition, on which she reproduced a copy of our form (the final version) and then filled in the blanks from the information contained in hand written draft forms provided by our many volunteers. We called the file SHIPLOG 1
At the time we started on the Formbase programme I had no computer experience or knowledge. We did not appreciate the magnitude of the task of recording this information. Employees of my Daughter-in-law were not familiar with our aims. Many of our volunteers used different criteria for recording information. Place names were very important to some, and not to others. Some recorded only information contained in the body of the articles, omitting very informative information in the caption and description of illustrations or in the "Passing Hails", letters sent in to C.H.J. Snider by his readers, and reproduced in whole or in part.
When the first few hundred of the forms were produced many of the problems were discovered. By this time I had purchased a Computer, an IBM PS, 286 with 30 MB. I did not have Windows.
however the programme incorporated, under license, sufficient windows for us to work the programme.
I had the programme transferred onto my computer, and I then set about to "Edit" the 1309 forms that had been set up on the programme. I have tried to bring some sort of uniformity to the material recorded. This has entailed the reading of each and every article while sitting in front of the computer, making such changes as appeared necessary. In many cases, because of lack of clarity in the reproduction of the articles, I had to refer to the original microfilm. To do this, I purchased a huge 35MM microfilm reader, that is mostly not working, but did the job.
When completed I gave a copy of the Formbase data base programme to the Province of Ontario Archives, The Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library and then donated the programme to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston.
Maurice Smith, then Curator of the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes has converted the data material into a text based data programme, DBText, and it is available on the Museums Website,
