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Celebrating Alberta's Italian Community
The Celebrating Alberta’s Italian Community website was developed by the Heritage Community Foundation in partnership with the National Congress of Italian-Canadians, Edmonton District in 2002. It is one of the 84 multimedia website comprising the Alberta Online Encyclopedia (www.albertasource.ca). When the Foundation ceased operations on June 30, 2009, the Encyclopedia was gifted to the University of Alberta. The NCIC has obtained the rights for this website and its rich historical and educational content will be made available from time to time in the next year.
The website was developed by Adriana A. Davies, Executive Director of the Heritage Community Foundation and the Editor-in-Chief of the Alberta Online Encyclopedia and her staff. Italian community volunteers contributed information including Milena Alzetta; Carlo and Lina Amodio; E. R. and Rita Cavaliere; Maria Caria Mauro; Father Augusto Feccia, Santa Maria Goretti Church; Frattin family; Sabatino Roncucci and the Dante Alighieri Society; the Saccomanno family; Alessandro and Lina Urso; and many others who contributed their oral histories as well as family photographs.
Edmonton Region
Italians probably came to Edmonton as early as the 1880s when the Canadian Pacific Railway ventured westward. Italian sojourners (seasonal labourers) worked on its construction, the coal mines being developed and then in developing of townsites and other resource industries.
As a railway centre and staging point for development to the West in the Coal Branch and to the North, Edmonton became a destination early in the century. It attracted people not only from northern Italy but also from southern Italy though the numbers from the North were higher at this time. These hard-working men and women left their mark and introduced the region to Italian culture and traditions, as well as contributing to its economic development. The history was written by Italian community historian Adriana A. Davies.
Oral Histories - Edmonton
The recording of oral history is an important tool for the development of social or community history. It is an attempt to record, on tape or other media, the ideas, experiences, and impressions of persons who might not otherwise leave any written record. It is an important tool for primary research in community, ethnocultural, working class or other types of history that were traditionally under-represented in historiography. Oral history utilizes and adds to existing information about historical events and other aspects of "official" history; it is not a substitute for more traditional techniques of research but does provide an invaluable glimpse into the lives and experiences of those interviewed.
In the latter part of the 20th century, it has become a vehicle for understanding cultural memory and living traditions-all of those aspects of life that help define identity and create a sense of place. Although an interview cannot capture everything that a person knows, it can capture part of a person's life experience and fill gaps in our written historical knowledge. Oral histories may not be historically accurate because people's memories are imperfect and may also be influenced by wish fulfillment and desire for certain things to be so. Having said this, they have an immediacy and vibrancy that is lacking in the formal recounting of events.
We are extremely fortunate that, on several occasions and through several different projects such as the Dante Alighieri Oral History Project, the Italians Settle in Edmonton Oral History Project, and the Celebrating Edmonton's Italian Community Project, that there a great number of Oral Histories recorded with members from Alberta’s Italian Community in Alberta. In this section we would like to share with you some of these, and allow you to experience the stories of triumph and tragedy, as told by those that lived them.