I’ve been returning to the Glen Major Forest over the last few years, in winter with snowshoes or on hot summer days in sneakers. North of Pickering, it’s just 45 minutes from Yonge and Bloor in good traffic, but is an expanse of wilderness that seems much farther away from the city.

Though the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority is installing new way finding signs and maps, the meandering trails make it easy to get lost in the forest. Or at least feel lost; no southern Ontario woodlot is so extensive you’ll be lost for long. Walk in a relatively straight line, and you’ll hit a concession road soon enough.

However even as more of Glen Major and adjacent Walker Woods are revealed on subsequent walks, the trails are becoming familiar, and I don’t always look at the maps to help choose a direction at a fork. Glen Major feels a bit like home, like these are my woods now.

Feeling a connection to a place where one doesn’t have roots can be tricky. Some people go through their entire lives in an adopted city or town without truly feeling at home. As a Toronto émigré, like many others, it’s taken work to make this place home. Though I was born in Ontario, both my parents emigrated from elsewhere, so my people here only go back to the 1960s. And yet, I can’t fathom thinking of another place as home.

Noticing when things change, and remembering what was, is a way into feeling at home. It could be as small an area as a single urban block. Change is just about the only constant in a city; shops come and go, as do the people running them and walking the sidewalks. That cozy familiarity is why change can also make people nervous, and there’s a lot of change in a city like Toronto.

The attachment many people had to Honest Ed’s is part of this. I never really understood the ferocity of the love: a big box store selling a lot of cheaply made items, albeit a quirky one, run by a benevolent family who seemed to have a genuine affection for the city. Though Ed’s didn’t define home to me, the creaks in the old wood floors were intimate ones to many people as were the byzantine passages between the buildings, and its sheer block-long size embedded its place in the emotional landscape of thousands of Torontonians, something that has to be respected even as the addition of rental apartments at a busy corner is a good thing.

The ravines that snake their way through the GTA change much slower than the rest of the city, and they follow natural cycles. Repeated walks down a favourite trail in each of the four seasons can reveal a pattern that is comforting: things fall apart, but then they come back in the spring. They lend a sense of permanence and predictability to the city.

It doesn’t take much knowledge of local history to create an attachment either. Up at Glen Major I’ve seen old aerial photos that show it used to be farmland, and have read that part of it used to be an old aggregate quarry that’s been re-naturalized. There’s also a nearby Canadian Pacific Railway line where a long-gone Glen Major Station once stood, a rural stop where passengers had to flag down the train. On walks I look for signs of all this, or imagine it. None of this is my personal history, but knowing it is a kind of respect for the place and that creates a connection.

Finding home in Toronto remains a work in progress for me, and digging into the neglected, at least in my experience, First Nations history, is a part of this. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this deep history, but here are three relatively recent books that are helping.

Overturning the notion that Toronto is merely a couple centuries old is Toronto: An Illustrated History of Its First 12,000 Years, detailing the full breadth of human history here. Another archeologically minded book, Before Ontario: The Archeology of a Province, does similar for the 15,000 years of human presence in the province. The third book is We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River. Not exactly part of the GTA, it’s an important hinterland that is deeply connected to this city.

Just three books of many others that help make this city and province richer and seem part of something much older than I was led to believe. Though not my history, or anyone I’m related to directly, learning it makes Toronto feel even more like home.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef