Thanks to entrepreneurial leadership, the Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives, an independent non-profit corporation established in 1993 to acquire, preserve and make important historical documents available, has once again expanded the local resources available online.
The details on the additions are in this press release.
Thanks to generous funding received from the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors Program, some 2,000 newspaper issues – from 1938 to 1975 – have been digitized and are now available on the Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives’ website. As a result, the Arnprior Chronicle is now available online from 1885 through 1966, although there are many missing editions, including full years, in the earliest years. This is followed by the Arnprior Guide from mid-1966 to December 1975, thus providing nearly 100 years of local history online.
Offering a new gateway to local history, everyone with internet access can freely read these newspapers from their home, regardless of where they live or their mobility. Researchers no longer need to travel to view these newspapers, which is especially important for those self-isolating and during the Archives continued limited in-person access.
The digitized newspapers can be searched, using a word or phrase, or they can be browsed using the finding aid. The newest additions cover nearly 40 years, from near the end of the Great Depression, through World War II, and the subsequent three decades of growth and change in the Arnprior and surrounding area. Issues beyond these digitized dates are still available to view at the Archives on microfilm.
Besides the expanded online newspaper collection, there have been a number of enhancements to make the newspapers more discoverable and to improve the user experience. Much of this work was funded by the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society.
The related birth, marriage, and death indexes, abstracted from the newspapers, have been expanded online to include 1935 and most of 1936. The individual names are linked back to the related newspaper page and now the search results are highlighted rather than hunting for the name within the page. With the additional 2,500 names, there are now more than 17,000 abstracts available for viewing. Thanks to volunteers, Arnold McIntyre and Debbie Miller, for their hard work in scouring the newspapers to create these latest abstracts.
Two other noteworthy enhancements have been made. In addition to the ability to search across all the holdings described online, there is now a search box in the newspaper finding aid to allow a search within just the newspaper collection. As well, the list of issues within each newspaper title is now divided by decade to minimize scrolling for those titles containing many issues, such as the Arnprior Chronicle.
To access the search function on the Archives’ website and the finding aids, visit https://search.adarchives.org/.
COMMENT: Who is theABMA entrepreneurial leadership referred to?
Past President: Irene Robillard
Past Archivist: Laurie Dougherty
Archivist: Kristen Mercier
My apologies to anyone missed.
Bravo for the leaders at ABMA for utilizing federal and OGS resources in combination with tried and true volunteer input. Surely this is a model that could be used by other genealogical and heritage societies in the province who have newspapers and archival collections that remain untapped by researchers. It appears that solutions are available, the ABMA have certainly made excellent use of them.