As we prepare for Heritage Week 2018, the theme is ever more on our minds – “History Stands the Test of Time.”
There are inspiring stories of the endurance of First Nations cultures, family treasures that somehow escaped destruction, and the gracefully aging wooden buildings that have not yet succumbed to fire, rot, or developer.
But we have another historic element that has endured and continues to give full value to the present day – our community newspapers.
In an age when all newspapers are threatened, we need to fully consider the value they represent.
In our community archives, we have copies of the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows Weekly Gazette from 1922 to 1980. Never does a week go by without us consulting this resource.
It was so clearly valuable that, in 1996, we began an index of the newspaper that lists the usual life events of births, deaths, and marriages, but also includes announcements of building and organization starts and ends, of houses completed and family ready, and of families moving in and moving out.
It has taken more than 20 years to construct that index, which boasts 41,000 separate entries – all written out by hand by someone leafing through the old papers.
One friend of the archives refers to it as our “crystal ball.”
If you call the Maple Ridge Museum and Archives looking for information on a family, a house, or an organization, chances are the person responding is looking through scans of newspaper clippings mixed with other resources.
Our collection of nearly 60,000 digital images reflects 30 years of information collection, including newspaper clippings files that were created at the Maple Ridge Public Library from the 1970s to the 1990s and continued at the museum to the present day.
A good example of the use of newspapers as a dated record is in dating houses. It is very difficult to find a construction date for a house. Even if you go through the Land Titles Office, you will find dates of subdivision, but not necessarily of construction.
But when, for example, the local paper of Feb. 1, 1923 records a gem like this, we know exactly when construction occurred:
“Mr. D. M. Hartnell’s bungalow is now receiving its finishing touches. It is alike beautiful for location and structure. The family expect to move in about the middle of the month. “
The beauty of the newspaper is that it is a dated record that is very difficult to argue with. After all, why would anyone report the completion of a house that hadn’t happened yet or long after when it was no longer “news”?
The old papers have their flaws – they were made to be ephemeral and discarded after reading, so the paper is poor quality and steadily browns with the years. There are also typesetting errors and spelling mistakes, but overall, that can easily be forgiven for the sake of the dated record of our community history.
One of the best side-effects of our form of government is that representatives from all over the province had to spend considerable time in Victoria, where their local papers were out of reach. A practice was established where all local papers were sent to the Legislature library and bound into large volumes.
In later years, some sets were cut from their bindings and microfilmed. It was this latter effort which made it possible to have copies of the entire print run available to any library with a reader.
Sadly, the rise of the internet killed this program. Now that members of the Legislature can get their local papers online, the continued expense of the mass collection and filming project could not be justified. For most papers, that means the microfilming process ended in the middle 1990s.
For our next big adventure, we are planning a project to digitize the pages of the Gazette that are on microfilm and make them accessible to all in a word-searchable format. We estimate that this project will involve scanning nearly 64,000 microfilmed pages.
Be sure and join us next week to observe Heritage Week. There are displays in the public library, a heritage awards event at St. Andrews Heritage Church Hall at 7 p.m. on Feb. 22, and walking tours of Maple Ridge Cemetery (Feb. 18 at 1 p.m.) and Haney town centre (Feb. 24 at 1 p.m.). Call the museum at 604-463-5311 for more information on any of these activities.
By Val Patenaude, director of Maple Ridge Museum.