WWW.VE3HO.CA

About Us & Web Site, Page

This site started with the realization that we were not far from retirement and that we would need to find things to keep busy when we left our day jobs besides our hobbies.  Neither of us wanted to quite working entirely,  but we wanted to start doing things that were more in keeping with what we wanted to do. We both are interested in computers and used them extensively in our jobs.  Accounting,  spreadsheets,  databases, PDF's  were our bread and butter. So adding web site design and maintenance seemed a logical next step.

We have been living here in the center of the Niagara Peninsula since 1976. We live in a small village of about 4,000 inhabitants in an area rich in agriculture, with lots of vineyards, orchards, poultry, and dairy farms, as well as horse breeding farms for racing, trotting, pacing, and saddle horses. The Niagara Peninsula lies on the US Canadian border between Lakes Ontario, to the north and Lake Erie to the south. Our temperatures range from -35°C to +35°C at the extremes. It is a pretty area in a rural setting which we like and yet we have access to all the amenities of the big cities at our door step, like Toronto and Buffalo, both just an hour away depending on the traffic.

In the beginning there were two main areas on this site. The first one developed was the Nn3 section. This was developed as part of a class project on writing web pages and has grown to become its own separate web site at www.nn3.ca which has become one of several major information sites on this model railroad scale. There has been very little published about this small scale in model railroading publications over the last thirty years but it has become much better known through web pages such as these. Nn3 is the narrow gauge part of N-scale, so for that reason I have included a small section on that gauge as well.  So the Nn3 section continues to grow on its own site www.nn3.ca.

The second major part of this site is the genealogy section where I have published the information about our ancestry that I have gathered over the years and would like to share that information with others who might be interested in it. It has been interesting in the first 18 months after publishing the first family trees the contacts we have made from others researching their family roots and willing to share that information with me. I 2000 I visited the sites of my families past places of residence. While we found no evidence of the original homesteads in Gore Township, Argentuil County, Québec we did find lots of evidence of family history in farm buildings in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and the Prairie Provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

I have also been involved in the Amateur Radio hobby for many years. I served in the RCN as a radio operator for three years and obtained my license while in the Navy. I served on HMCS Haida and HMCS Bonaventure and at HMCS Albro Lake (Albro Lake was the Ship to Shore Naval Radio Station CFH located at Albro Lake in Dartmouth NS in the early 60's it has since been moved to St. Margaret's Bay area of NS). So there is a section covering those parts of this hobby that I am interested in or been involved in. In September 2008 I became an inactive ham when I took down my large antenna array and sold my equipment. At 65 I could no longer climb and maintain this system myself and getting others to do it was too expensive  living on pension income.

My wife and I enjoy ballroom dancing not as a competitive sport but as something we can do together and it enhances her hobby which is Ice Dancing, something I do not do. Our ballroom dancing started in 1982 through a friend of Dora's in Ice Dancing and has continued over the years. About 1992 our teacher said we should we should teach beginners as it would strengthen our basics and we were good at helping others in his beginners classes. So for 13 years we taugh in Niagara on the Lake, at the Niagara district Secondary School on the East/West line on Wednesday evenings.  It started with one class of about 7 couples and progressed to the point where we had more couples than we could handle in one class so we went to two session on the same night.  So we have added our class syllabus to the site and information that would be useful to our students. In May 2000 we were one of the first groups of students that our teacher had pass the Bronze Level International Ballroom Latin Dance tests. In 2003 we were one of the first group of students that our teachers had pass the Silver level International Ballroom Latin Dance tests.  In 2003 we were asked to teach ballroom classes at Niagara College and we will be there again for the 2006/2007 season on Thursday evenings.

Dora's interest in Ice Dancing has lead to our attending numerous Ice Dance Weekends in the Detroit, Rochester, Montreal, Barrie, Kitchener and Toronto. When the Mariposa weekend needed a presence on the Web we provided that.  With our growing collection of Ice Dance music gets me involved in my wife's hobby as an ICE DJ spinning the dance tunes for the on ice dance sessions in several locations and it does not requiring me to skate, cause I cannot dance on skates.

We may be contacted at the following addresses.

Click here to contact Garth by e-mail.

Click here to contact Dora by e-mail.

snail mail to: The Hamiltons,  P. O. Box 1156,  Fonthill, ON,  Canada L0S-1E0