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Title: Seaman family videos : Birthday Surprise
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring a blindfolded child being led to a birthday cake and blowing out the candles with her family by her side. The footage also features the family sharing kisses in front of a birthday cake and bringing presents to the birthday girl. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "Every year, on our birthdays, my parents would go all out. Birthday surprises in our house were everything! In this family footage, shot at our third family home on Lippé Street in St. Laurent, a borough in Montreal, Quebec, you can see Heather with her siblings and parents celebrating her seventh birthday. It was December 28, 1977 – three days after Christmas – so Heather always received double the presents every year! 1977 was also the same year that her sister, Hazel, broke her arm – you can see her wearing a cast on her left arm."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(05)
Date: 28 Dec. 1977
Identifier: 2019-067/001(05)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153655

Title: Seaman family videos : Celebrating Halloween in Laval, Quebec
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring children in costumes, joking around, waving to the camera, entering and exiting a home, and showing off their treats. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "The Seaman family moved to their second family home on 100th Avenue in Chomedey, Laval, Quebec in the mid-1970s. In this particular footage, Heather recalls getting ready for Halloween and dressing up in homemade costumes. Heather recalls doing a multitude of different activities as a child, and explains that they weren’t limited as children. For example, her brother, Herbert, played hockey at a high level and played guitar, while she and her sister Hazel figure skated, took piano lessons, and dance classes. "We were the only Black family in the neighbourhood and an interesting story is when we first moved there, people were shocked to see a Black family with two cars!" In Laval, while living at their fourth family home, back on 100th Avenue in Chomedey, Heather’s mother, Althea Joseph Charles Seaman, started the ‘Laval Black Community Association’ in 1983 to bring together Black people from different cultural backgrounds. The intention was to create a support system, but also a space for people to learn about each other’s cultures and share their achievements and heritage with the wider Canadian community. Her mother also developed an annual Black History Month celebration where people showcased their artwork, music, writing, spoken word pieces and dance performances. Business people, clergy from various faiths and politicians from all levels of government were always in the audience – no matter their race or whether they were English or French speakers. "The organizations that our mom created were to give us a sense of our heritage" and to share that with others."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(03)
Date: [between 1973-1976]
Identifier: 2019-067/001(03)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153656

Title: Seaman family videos : Christmas Day Breakfast in St. Laurent, Quebec
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring children gathering around a kitchen table, making the sign of the holy cross, pointing to watches they just received for Christmas, and eating brunch with two adults. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "The footage shows the Seaman family with some cousins, enjoying Christmas brunch at home on Lippé Street, in St. Laurent, where they lived for about three or four years. Christmas was a big deal in their house. Annually, they would enjoy a big breakfast before opening presents. As Catholics, the day would also include attending Christmas mass, then later welcoming relatives and friends at the home for a holiday celebration, involving lots more food, including Caribbean dishes and desserts."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(06)
Date: 25 Dec. 1977
Identifier: 2019-067/001(06)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153657

Title: Seaman family videos : Commonwealth of Dominica family vacation
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring a plane on the tarmac; children enjoying sugarcane and an adult milking a cow; adults and children drinking from a freshly-picked coconut; children swimming at a beach; cityscapes in parts of Dominica, with streets, buildings and mountains in the background; children playing in a shallow river; a family carrying beach supplies and walking on a path surrounded by a tropical forest. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "Heather and her siblings met and visited her paternal grandparents for the first time in 1978. "My grandfather was born in 1898. He lived to about 105, so he got to see three centuries – the late 1800’s, the 1900’s and he died in the early 2000’s." This was the family’s first vacation overseas, a memorable time in the Commonwealth of Dominica where Heather’s parents were born and raised - her father in Vieille Case and her mother in Portsmouth. In the travel clips, various footage shows the time Heather and her family swam at Purple Turtle Beach, enjoyed sugarcane, fresh coconut water and watched her Dad milk a cow on her grandparents’ property in La Haut. There’s also footage of their visit to a busy city. Then back in the countryside, Heather notes, "That’s just us walking with a relative through a village in Dominica" as the relative carries a load of laundry, washed in the river, in a basket on her head. In those days, there was no plumbing or electricity in the rural area where her grandparents lived, so Heather remembers it being pitch-black at night, with only lanterns, candles and the moon to light the way. Using the outhouse there at night was scary for her as a child."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(07)
Date: 1978
Identifier: 2019-067/001(07)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153658

Title: Seaman family videos : Couvrette Street, St. Laurent, Quebec
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring a child brushing the teeth of a younger child. Footage also features children playing on a swing set in a park, a boy riding a bicycle and a girl riding a tricycle, and playing on a slide. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "Daily life in Montreal, Quebec. This footage shows Heather trying to teach her younger sister Hazel how to brush her teeth. Heather describes this footage as "normal kids doing normal things." Heather recalls playing at the park across from her family home a lot and riding their bikes. She describes the home in this footage as her "first family home in Montreal," located on Couvrette Street in St. Laurent, which is a borough in Montreal, Quebec."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(04)
Date: [1973-1975]
Identifier: 2019-067/001(04)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153659

Title: Seaman family videos : Family picnic at La Fontaine Park, Montreal
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movie featuring adults and children preparing a BBQ and children playing at La Fontaine Park. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "Heather describes her home video footage as "[my family] just going about our daily lives in Quebec." Footage from the mid or late-1970s, shows Heather – at maybe six or seven years old - with her family having a picnic in Montreal’s La Fontaine Park. Her older brother, Herbert, was around ten or eleven years old. Her sister Hazel was maybe five. They used to go on family picnics almost every weekend in various city parks, where they would BBQ and have sandwiches and play games, or go swimming depending on the park. Every summer the Seaman family also held an annual picnic in their backyard, and invited neighbours, relatives and friends. Heather adds: "Our parents wanted to open us to other cultures and experiences - to experience other people. We used to go to our Jewish friends’ houses and our Greek friends’ houses. We used to have picnics all the time in our backyard." Their French Canadian and Italian friends and neighbours would also attend parties and picnics at their home."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(02)
Date: [between 1977-1979]
Identifier: 2019-067/001(02)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153660

Title: Seaman family videos : Montreal Caribbean Carnival
Description: Item consists of a Black-Canadian family’s home movies featuring crowds and performers at Montreal Carifiesta parade. Participants in costumes are playing mas, marching with a masquerade band. Several carnival bands - made up of dozens and sometimes hundreds of participants, wearing themed costumes created by various Caribbean designers and assembled by volunteers - would dance and perform for crowds and a group of judges (who would select and later announce the best mas band) at a local stadium, before the masquerade bands would make their way through downtown streets. In the 70’s and 80’s, the Carifiesta parade would mainly make its way along Ste-Catherine Street in Montreal, before the parade was moved to nearby René Lévesque Boulevard in later years. Donor(s) and project contributed description follows: "This footage was shot in the mid-1970’s and marks one of the first Montreal Caribbean Carnival celebrations in the city. Heather’s parents, Richard and Althea Seaman, brought her and her siblings, Hazel and Herbert, to see their first few parades as spectators. In later years, the family was occasionally involved as participants – whether helping to create costumes, build floats or march in the annual parade. The summer event was established to celebrate and showcase the Caribbean culture and heritage of immigrants, who were born on one of the diverse islands of the West Indies or those who had ancestry there. While Caribbean immigrants in Toronto started their carnival celebration - Caribana - in 1967, to mark Canada’s centennial celebration, Montrealers held their first Carifiesta parade and festival in July 1975."
Type: video files
Fonds: Home Made Visible collection (F0723)
Accession / Box: 2019-067/001(01)
Date: [between 1973-1976]
Identifier: 2019-067/001(01)
Identifier (PID): yul:1153661