Remixed GIFs curated by Wayne Cook, “your Simcoe County GenWeb co-ordinator,” who from 1998-2017 “hosted and maintained” waynecook•com (safe WayBack Machine link; original is sadly link-rotten).
On November 19, 1998, triple-webring-memberWayne Cook updated the counter script on his eponymous website. “Add 4200 to this #,” he typed into the Hot Dog window humming over cathode-ray tubes, magnetics and electronics whir-clicking through their quaint calculation tasks.
15 years later, Wayne’s visit counter froze at ~540,000 hits like the hands of a broken clock. Wayne’s site outlived many of the tools that built it (not to mention the design logic of its original era).
Across 2013’s WayBack snapshots, his counter ceases ticking, before breaking entirely; it remained broken briefly after Wayne modernized that fall, preserving pagination and content. Wayne outlasting another damn counter embed seems to have precipitated his refresh cycle. Days after he launched the new look, Wayne removed visit counters from waynecook•com for good.
Obsessed with history, genealogy, HTML, and documentarianism, Wayne was an avid networker and compiler of historical information. Over his Wasaga Beach phone jack in 1998, Wayne began assembling, digitizing, and sharing historical documents I would eventually rediscover in nearby Barrie in 2024.
Badge of honour, 1999-2018
You see, Wayne spent what I imagine must have been many hundreds of retirement hours transcribing the contents of several history books and similar documents into lightly structured HTML plain-text, as legible now as it was when he first hit that FTP.
In the process, Wayne managed to proof and digitally publish mind-boggling volumes of historical information centred on Simcoe County, Ontario, our shared home.
In addition, Wayne’s work is widely cited and linked to across Wikipedia and genealogical and historical projects, some of which persist (and others link-rotten themselves).
Among the irons I jam into Factso‘s fire, I seek to platform Wayne’s efforts in a modern, searchable, navigable way, with my accompanying annotation.
Factso intends to provide a secure replacement for Wayne’s work and update the risky links, creating a version of Wayne’s preserved documentary evidence designed for 2024’s Internet information wars.
Beyond the Simcoe County resources indexed below, Wayne also eventually built the Parry Sound-Muskoka equivalent. Plus, he linked to a plethora of Web 1.0 sites that now persist in WayBack solely because a robot followed one of Wayne’s <a href>s! This is ephemera; this is the fragility of information and truth; this is where we’re at, people.
For now, enjoy the Netscape-inflected eyewash of the safe WayBack Machine links indexed below. (Trust me—don’t go to that spammy-takeover “secure” waynecook•com. Not worth the malware risk.) Stay tuned for SO-RCD 💾 /2017CookWayneT.
Index of Selected Historical Simcoe County Documents (1830s-1909)
Digitized by Wayne Cook, 1998-2017, atwaynecook•com
A History of Simcoe County, by Andrew Frederick Hunter (1863-1940), printed in Barrie by the county council, 1909. Hunter began publishing his local research in a column on October 24, 1889, 103 years to the day before I was born. Earlier that year, Hunter had bought the Barrie Examiner, the newspaper which printed his column.
Wayne published this as A Voice From the Past, doing a palimpsestic cyberventriloquist act as Hunter. Swartzweldian (bizarro-mazing; timeless), 90s-classic Web 1.0 bit. Maybe some Freudian projection, too.
While he left out Hunter’s ~100 illustrations, Wayne gave us the GIF above, and this 1999 INDEX OF GIF PROVIDERS!!!; that said, I would have loved to see Wayne take on ASCII art to render the portraits and street maps.
Volume 1: Its Public Affairs • Wayne’s Part Two • scans
Volume 2: The Pioneers• Wayne’s Part One • scans, pp 1-262
Simcoe County Gazetteer of Towns & Villages, 1872. Replete with WordArt family names of contemporary residents and advertisements from businesses. Sign me up for “Dr. J. Ball & Co.’s new patent improved IVORY AND LIGUMVITEE EYE CUPS,” Misss-ter Clemengerrr.
BONUS: secondhand PROPS🥈Marjorie McQuay for transcribing two post-War of 1812, pre-Rebellion of 1837 county censuses:
Inspection for the Township of Oro, by Wellsley Richey, 1836 (Ontario Archives: RG 1 A-VI-9, Vol 9, microfilm reel MS 5393). Documents numerous settled Black families (with racial parcels, “colored settlers who fought in 1812 were given 100 acres to whites’ 200). In the 1840s, these families built the still-standing Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church at Old Barrie Road and 3rd Line. (My question: What was Wellesley’s standard for an “indigent settler”?)
My heartfelt thanks goes out to Gracie Buck who has contributed quite a few poems to this part of the website.
I’ve known Gracie about 3 years since we first met on the internet, she has inspired me the most in creating this website and for this I will be forever grateful.
Presumably, our diligent curator expired with it, or hit a late-life capacity barrier that ended that diligence; ironically, given his digital efforts, a cursory series of searches regarding the obituary of one Wayne Cook has so far turned up nothing. Yet Wayne’s works persist, if less widely than Hunter’s abundant textbook.
In a fateful, ironic twist, Wayne Cook and Andrew Hunter’s historical enterprises ended the same month. Hunter owned the Examiner from 1889 to 1895. By 2017, the Examiner was owned by TorStar. In a “swap” of newspapers that both would immediately shut down, the last printer of the Barrie Examinerceased publication on November 27, 2017.
With groaner jokes, colour clashes, badly-tiled textures, and textual memories, we keep Wayne alive; by keeping Wayne alive, we keep alive the traces of those before us whose stories Wayne sought to follow Andrew Hunter in recording.
Wayne Cook’s multipotent legacy abides: adorable grandkids, decades of research, DIY internet glimpses, knowledge otherwise lost.
Good stuff, bruh. Thanks Wayner. ‘Preesh. Say… Why duncha giv these nyce peeple a toor ahn ther way out’tha post?
For those of you not familiar with Simcoe County, I will give you a brief outline of the borders.
Follow the mauve borderline from just west of Collingwood, head south along County Rd. 21 to just south of Maple Valley, head east to just before Glencairn, head south to Highway #9, head east and follow the mauve line to where it enters Cook’s Bay at the bottom of Lake Simcoe, now follow the dashed line thru Lake Simcoe where it comes out at County Rd. 23 near Gamebridge, follow the Talbot River then head north to County Rd. 6 now head back west and follow the south shore of the Severn River where it comes out at Big Chute, follow the dashed line where it goes thru Severn Sound and into Georgian Bay just above Hope Island and that my friends is Simcoe County. Long drive wasn’t it. — 1999
Eternal gratitude and appreciation, Wayne; History Television and Factso both approve.
