“After all, Berlin was our home, we were all children together there.” WLMK Diary 4 August 1925 William Lyon Mackenzie King Digitization Project About the Collection William Lyon Mackenzie King was born in Berlin, later Kitchener, Ontario, on 17 December 1874. His formative years (birth to 19 years old) were spent in his birthplace, and he never failed to acknowledge the significance of his hometown on his personal development. King
still holds the record as the longest serving Prime Minister in William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote in his diary that Berlin’s “strong influence of home, school and church, and simple community life among all classes” had well prepared him for public life. Several
collections were used to create this database, including the Kitchener
Public Library’s Grace Schmidt Room of Local History. Project
partners also included Woodside National Historic Site of Over 140 photographs and newspaper clippings can be viewed in this database. The majority of the images are photographs of Mackenzie King and his family depicting their life in Berlin, as well as images of the community itself as it was in the 1870s to 1890s. Many newspaper clippings from the GSR files were also scanned and added to the database. |