A lot of it depends of how you define hockey - is it simply a game played with curved sticks on ice? If that is the case then we have paintings from the early 17th century that display what appear to the modern viewer to be 'hockey-like' scenes.

Hendrick Avercamp in particular (c.1534-1635) has a number of paintings that appear to show 'hockey-like' activity such as Winter Games on the Frozen River Ijssel or A Winter Scene with Two Gentlemen Playing Colf. It is in the latter painting that we get a bit closer to the mark, as the painting is itself named after the sport it depicts - Colf, or Kolven. I have never played the game myself, but I have always seen it described as a cross between Golf and Hockey - so while not hockey specifically, it is one of the many games such as the Gaelic Hurley, etc that helped inspire the modern game.

The local Mi'kmaq (One of the Aboriginal peoples of the Maritimes) played a game on ice with a wooden puck, which likely had a significant influence in the development of the modern sport. Unsurprisingly, the oldest known hockey stick is thought to be Mi'kmaq made and was created in Cape Breton sometime in the 1830s. The Starr manufacturing company in Dartmouth even named one of their lines of hockey sticks 'Micmac' after the style and reputation of the Mi'kmaq craftsmen. Wicken's The Colonization of Mi'kmaw History and Memory has a few pages mentioning the Mi'kmaq traditional craft.

So we have a number of forebears that inspired the modern game of hockey, but defining any one place as the sport's birthplace is a little more difficult. It is not enough to simply be 'hockey-like' - as that definition includes a wide variety of games such as Colf, Hurley, etc.

We need something a little more specific, which resembles the modern sport to a greater degree. This is where the Windsor claim gets into a little bit of trouble. They base their claim on the writtings of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a judge and author born in Windsor. In a work published in 1844, reminiscing back to his earlier days as a youth attending Windsor's King's College, he states among their various activities, playing "...hurley on the long pond on the ice..." Kingston has its own quote, their quote is from 1843, from the journal of a British soldier who wrote "Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice." So we know that in Windsor in the early 1800s ice-hurley was being played, while in Kingston by the 1840s a game specifically referred to as hockey was being played.

But what is the earliest mention of hockey? It comes from a letter written in England in 1799 by William Pierre Le Cocq, stating ""I must now describe to you the game of Hockey; we have each a stick turning up at the end. We get a bung. There are two sides one of them knocks one way and the other side the other way. If any one of the sides makes the bung reach that end of the churchyard it is victorious."

If are looking at a 'war of quotes' then the case could be made that neither Windsor or Kingston are the proper birthplace of the sport, but instead England is Hockey's birthplace.