A page from Flora’s 1911 Nature Diary, Macdonald School For Teachers, McGill.
Hmm. I just noticed that the University of Toronto’s Senior College Encyclopedia has just linked my page on the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education onto their site. From what I see this online encyclopedia is in its early stages and is to contain information relating to that university’s history .
Now, Wikipedia also links to my page (www.tighsolas.ca/page82.html) but it looks like the U of T version is being mounted by experts in the field, and not ‘just anyone.’
It’s all very interesting; how things sway back and forth with respect to new technologies.
It’s also interesting because my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website is about Montreal in 1910 and Anglo Quebeckers, but franky, were it not for the material on archive.org that the University of Toronto placed there, I’d wouldn’t have been able to research the era and the family in such detail. No one has really taken care to preserve the rich archives of various anglo Quebec institutions in Quebec because the institutions have faded and many archives left to decay by the laws of entropy. That’s how history gets erased, you know.
Now, 6 years ago, when I began research on the Nicholson Family Letters, and when I found Flora’s model school portfolio in with the letters, I had to go to McGill to track down info on the CIHM microfiches, the Gazette and Star newspapers on microfilm and in the McLennan library itself, where I found the 3 volume Royal Commission Report. It had been hardly touched over the years, I imagine.
I wrote the page above from the report.
It’s so much easier today, isn’t it? And I’ve worked so hard. But I’m still figuring out what to do with the letters. They are important, “a window on the pre-war era” but no one wants to know about Anglo Quebec History. I’m exaggerating, but only a bit.
Yet, the story of the Nicholsons is really about the Story of Canada in 1910, but not necessarily ‘the official story.’
