Janet Kitz

Kitz had never heard of the Halifax explosion before she moved to Halifax. However, while taking anthropology courses at Saint Mary's University, Kitz grew interested in the disaster and its effects on the people of Halifax.[4] The 1917 munitions explosion killed nearly 2,000 people but was little known outside of Halifax. Only two books had been written about the event in the 70 years after the explosion and the only commemoration was a library in the North End of Halifax.[5] After writing a paper about the explosion, Kitz was hired by the Nova Scotia Museum to assist the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in cataloguing thousands of objects in the mortuary collection of objects from victims of the explosion discovered in the basement of the provincial legislature. This led to a temporary exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic called "A Moment in Time" in 1987 which was expanded to become a permanent exhibit curated by Kitz called "Halifax Wrecked" in 1994. Kitz also began to interview survivors of the explosion and their families, a process which evolved to become an ongoing oral history project with explosion survivors and their families.[6]

Kitz's work at the museum led her to write the 1989 book Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery. The book combined artifact research, oral history and documentary history to explore the explosion through the families involved. It has remained a definitive account which has influenced numerous works published since.[7][8] Kitz followed this book with Survivors: Children of the Halifax Explosion and December 1917: Revisiting the Halifax Explosion co-written with Dartmouth historian Joan Payzant in 2006.[9]

Kitz was a founding member of the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bells Committee which created a monument to the disaster in 1985 at Fort Needham Park overlooking the site of disaster.[10] As part of this work, Kitz organized a reunion of survivors at the monument which became an annual event. Kitz chaired the committee that marked the 75th anniversary of the explosion in 1992 with an academic conference and a scholarly book Ground Zero.[11] She worked with the families of sailors from the ship SS Curaca, sunk during the explosion, to have their names inscribed on a monument in Halifax's Fairview Cemetery in 2001.[12] In 2002 she led research with former mayor Edmund Morris and the Halifax Foundation in 2002 to create a definitive list of the victims of the explosion called "The Book of Remembrance of the Halifax Explosion" presented in a detailed online database at the Nova Scotia Archives.[13][14]