Mr. William Foster, manager of the Lakeside Coal Mine from 1923-1944, who retained the Register of Employees books from the mine and donated them to the Wabamun Public Library, and who wrote a short history of some of the mines in the area.
Nessa Watt, who kept the records when Mr. Foster passed away and gave them to the Village of Wabamun as a piece of history.
Loreen and Kathy from the Village Office who found the records when I went looking for them twenty years later.
Vienna at the Library, who found copies of the Wabamun Mirror newspaper from 1914-15, for me.
William Johnstone, who was a miner (with his father Tom and brother Fred) at Lakeside from 1934 to 1936 and who wrote his memoirs of those years.
My uncle, Fred Woollard, who was a driver and miner in the underground and a dragline operator for the surface mine, for his short history of the mines.
My father, Ed Woollard, who cut pit props and ties for the mine as a teenager, who went to war for his country and came back to shovel coal into boxcars, to run the tipple at the mine and, as a welder, to maintain the equipment for surface mining for thirty-nine years. Stifling heat in summer, bitter cold in winter, day or night, he was there to do the job to earn money for his family. We can never thank him enough.
During the years of operation of the Victory and Whitewood mines I have had relatives working there: My grandfather, Edwin John Woollard, his brother-in-law Louis Lent, his nephew Bernie Laight, My Uncle Dalus Peters, his wife, my Aunt Mary, ran the cookhouse, (my mother, Gertie, was cook's helper), their son Alex. Uncle Frank Anderson and two of his sons: Lorne and Jim, My uncle Fred Woollard, two of his sons: Stewart and Ken, my father Ed Woollard and two of his sons: Kerry and Laine, and his two sons-in-law: John Stafford and John Ames. My mother's cousin, John Bruce.