Once Abandoned but Never Forgotten: Wood Island, New Brunswick

Located just kilometers off Grand Manan’s southeastern coast, this small island once boasted over 60 families, stores, a school, a church, a post office, a multitude of farmhouses and fishing wharfs. Voluntarily abandoned by its residents for a combination of reasons, explored later in this paper, the last of the Wood Islander’s packed their bags and dispersed to the main island of Grand Manan and elsewhere by the end of the 1950s.   This collage is a curated collection of three images, taken from The Congregation, a documentary research project that explores the landscape of ‘public-facing history’ through combining traditional methods of historical analysis with documentary filmmaking. This research explores elements of collective identity and community formation/retention by looking at the church service held on Wood Island each summer with former residents, decedents and friends of the island.   This research approach is community-based and collaborative by nature. By bringing together the process of producing a documentary film about Wood Island while pursuing a research-based master’s degree, this research explores a path for creating documentary media and expanding the processes of disseminating research in a more experiential and publicly accessible way.