THIS IS HOW CANADA LIVED: 100 Years of One Family (1867–1967) | Full Documentary

It is five o'clock in the morning on the first of July, 1867, on a hundred-acre farm in Garafraxa Township, Wellington County, Ontario. The clock on the shelf strikes five, and a twenty-seven-year-old farmer whose parents came out from Ulster takes down his scythe — the hay does not care that a new country was proclaimed at midnight. A hundred years later to the hour, the same clock strikes five on a mantel in a new suburb of Toronto, and his great-granddaughter is carrying two sleepy children to the car. They are going to Expo 67. This film follows one family through four generations and a hundred years of Canadian life: four homes, four leavings, and one clock that always went with the one who left. It is not the story of prime ministers. It is the story of the hayfield and the concession school, the homestead and the harvest train, the sheet mill and the ration book, the bungalow and Saturday-night hockey on a brand-new television. ACT ONE — The concession road, 1867 to 1898. ACT TWO — The last best west, 1898 to 1918. ACT THREE — Steel town, 1922 to 1945. ACT FOUR — The house in the suburb, 1946 to 1967. 📌 What you'll learn • How an Ontario farm family really lived after Confederation: the census of 1871 and its question about where you came from, the free school on the concession, wheat to Guelph and butter to Fergus, the first pink Eaton's catalogue of 1884, the county poorhouse, the coldest winters a farmer's diary ever recorded — and why so many sons went west • How a prairie homestead worked near Saskatoon: treaty land and the Whitecap Dakota neighbours, the sworn statement that made the land yours, the harvest trains from Ontario, a wheat that ripened a week sooner, the petition a farm wife signed in 1916, a brother who volunteered, and the flu of 1918 • What life was like in a Hamilton steel town between the wars: the sheet mill, a pay envelope cut by a third, relief, the coldest day in twenty years, the strike of 1935, the Italian family next door in June 1940, and the women who built anti-aircraft guns while the ration book sat on the kitchen shelf • How the suburb changed everything after 1945: the Stelco strike of 1946, the first television and the first hockey game on it, the polio summer and the vaccine, a planned town in Don Mills built on twenty farms, Black Friday at Avro, a new flag, twenty million Canadians — and Expo 67 The family is a composite drawn from documented lives. Images are reconstructions; real photographs are held by Library and Archives Canada and the provincial archives. Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources • University of Guelph — Rural Diary Archive (Forbes Moir, West Garafraxa, 1884–1914; Franklin McMillan, 1934) • Wellington County Museum and Archives — the House of Industry and Refuge, 1877–1947 • Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan — Dominion Lands homestead files • University of Saskatchewan — Emmanuel College and the influenza of 1918 • Workers' City, Hamilton — Steeltown and the East End — and other sources. #CanadianHistory #FullDocumentary #HowWeLivedHere #Canada #Expo67 #LifeInCanada