During the July 2003 Lunenburg’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations, Dr. Chris Young, author of Register of The Foreign Protestants of Nova Scotia (ca. 1749-1770) and Committee Chair of the Grand Family Reunion, personally interacted with most of the 1453 founding settlers’ descendants in attendance, asking:

What was the singularly most important reason that you attended this celebration?

The most consistent and occurring answer was:

I wanted to see a Place where my ancestors lived and/or worked.

While contributing to its designations as a National Historical Site of Canada and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Lunenburg’s rich built heritage collection of 500+ Places has also created the rich family heritages for millions of descendants of the original Foreign Protestants immigrants to the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

To assist both our online and in-person visitors to more easily discover and enjoy personally important Places while enjoying Lunenburg’s rich built heritage on their walks through our Museum Without Walls, we have developed our Place Finder (a FREE Digital Tour Guide). Your personal digital guides simplifiy identification of potentially interesting and important Places by either property usage or interest type (art, music, churches, lodging, pub & eateries, etc.) or by family surname of interest.

Once identified, the resulting Place Profiles for each property provides a Google map, a street level current photograph, a photo gallery, property histories with architectural descriptions and Stories. Additionally, People, either original founding Foreign Protestants and/or their descendants historically connected to the property, will be identified for additional study and review.

During online pre-trip planning activities, these Place Profiles can be printed and saved for later in-person visits. During in-person visits, these Place Profiles can also be accessed in landscape mode by smartphones or tablets utilizing either the Town's Wi-Fi and/or personal cellular data plans. Our online sharing tools will also facilitate convenient Internet based sharing of this information with other interested relatives and/or friends.

The primary resource for the original architectural and historical information for these Places was the out-of-print: Lunenburg: An Inventory of Historical Buildings with Photographs and Historical and Architectural Notes, 2nd Edition, published in June 1984 by the Town of Lunenburg as a large (10 ½” X 14 ½") paperback coffee table book.

Realizing the immense historical value of this original book, the Foreign Protestants.com Society, working with other ancestral-heritage sensitive residents, property owners, non-profit organizations, and businesses has developed this not-for-profit community project to digitized this valuable information for not only them, but also visitors, both online and in-person.

A primary goal for creating this new digital edition is to create a more convenient and lasting digital system for the Town’s current property owners to more easily:

• share their additional interesting and valuable Place histories and Stories not only with Lunenburg’s other property owners, but also its visitors.
• update information reflecting their accurate renovations/improvements sensitive to the Town’s built heritage utilizing modern construction materials and techniques while also meeting the Town and national building codes.
• demonstrate how the Lunenburg community actively supports and promotes the Museum Without Walls to further generate more support and interest for the South Shore Genealogical Society and the Lunenburg Heritage Society and the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic!
• provide ancestral-heritage sensitive visitors considering possible Canadian and/or Lunenburg visits with online digital tools to more easily perform their online pre-trip planning activities.