HCMC Blogs

Hello everyone,

I had a good day in UVic Special Collections, working on a list of deserters for the justice theme. When I get this in order, I will go back to Victoria City Archives, and look through their police documents for these names. Before and after special collections closed, I was working on going through the early magazines of University School. After I finish writing all the captions (pointing people to noteworthy pages in each one, since each magazine is 32 pages), I'll upload those all at once. The reason I haven't uploaded anything yet is because I'm waiting for legal clearance to do so. I am also finalizing the list of education-related documents we want from Victoria City Archives, and I will upload that when it is done. I'm still waiting to hear back from the photographer about the pictures of Vic High memorials, but hopefully, that he will respond soon.

Monday morning, I have an appointment with the archivist from Glenlyon Norfolk about the records for Norfolk House School. Much of next week I will spend with the St. Michaels archivist, getting documents from them.

See you on Monday!

Leaving early.

It's now running OK. Had to rewrite the XQuery for version 1.0, and tweak various parameters and paths.

Hi,

I've spent the day continuing to build my church database and contact them all (or discern which ones should be contacted). I'm now up to 100 contacts for churches and individuals! I'll be continuing to arrange meetings with them and find relevant information through the coming weeks. I've worked most of today at the HCMC and talked to Greg about our dropbox issues. He says he may look into downloading the dropbox app for these computers here so we can use them the same way as our home computer (see below if you missed that). If he does, it will make our work in the lab a bit easier and less likely to mess up our programs. Now if only he could do something about these darn ergonomic keyboards...!

Kirsten and Ashley, in case you for some reason need to cross reference soldiers with church members, I've started a second page in my archive file for honour rolls. As I find more, I will continue to update it with names by church, and include indication of death if it is shown on the original roll. When I meet with the larger archives next week and the week after, I'll look for membership registers that can also be used for cross referencing.

I am cutting out early today, I just found out my house is being sold and we are having an appraiser in on Monday morning, so I've got to (literally) clean house and get everything in order before then. I'll make up the hours in the coming weeks.

So I've put a pdf into my Archives folder called Unit List and CEF Guide. The CEF Guide is just a visual I cobbled together from a couple of books and sites, a diagram of how the Canadian Expeditionary Force was organized (ie, what's bigger, a battalion or a brigade? What Division was the 62nd Battery part of?) and lists of all the units active overseas as of November, 1918. This is mostly for my own reference, but I thought I'd share it in case anybody else was interested! The Unit List names and records the activities of militia and CEF units that were mobilized in Victoria, or drew recruits from Victoria, or both, according to Library and Archives Canada. Unfortunately, their records are missing a few details - they do not have places of mobilization or places of recruitment for every unit they describe. The CEF units listed are just those that are recorded in their CEF unit guides as having been mobilized in Victoria and/or formed, at least in part, of Victorian recruits. It goes without saying that not all of the men who joined these units were from Victoria, but there's also a good chance that there were Victorians who signed up with units not listed here. There's got to be a way to find them too, though...

I have to apologize for the sparseness of the information related to the militia units I list - I am honestly not sure how many militia units were in the city during the war years. I couldn't find any lists of wartime militia units from reputable sources, nevermind a list that determined each unit's city of origin. I'm really sorry about this, but I will try to find out more about Victoria's militia once I get back to Victoria and into the collections of the Princess Mary's and the 5th Regiment.

When it comes to tagging, at this stage we could enter every unit as a tag and see how much we find - as I said, some of these units recruited in Victoria but mobilized elsewhere, so it's quite possible that the soldiers left nothing behind but an attestation paper or two before they shipped out. From what I've seen so far, there's a fair bit to be found on the 88th Regiment Victoria Fusiliers, the 30th Battalion, the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders/50th Regiment of Foot, and the 5th BC Regiment Canadian Artillery. Tags will have to take into account the fact that some units changed names and designations during the war; we could use slashed tags to indicate this (as in, 48th Battalion/3rd Pioneer Battalion) or just make two separate tags and apply them to every item we have pertaining to both the original unit and the renamed unit. I'll leave the decision up to Ashley and Jim!

If anybody finds any problems in the unit list or CEF guide, please tell me! I'll be tweaking them as I learn more, and would be grateful to know of any mistakes I've made!

I had a great day! The Victoria City Archives doesn't have detailed finding aids, so you have to ask the archivists to retrieve a lot of the collections, and go through them yourself to figure out what is in there, which is extremely enjoyable. I was there today going through personal records which contained photos of schoolchildren, and I finished off searching their city records relating to education on the online catalogue after they closed. I believe I have a complete list of education documents/photos from the city archives, so I will upload that list to dropbox tomorrow. First, though, I am going to UVic special collections to get a list of deserters from the 88th, so I can look them up in the police records for the 'justice' theme. I have also been going through the early yearbooks for University school, and writing captions to point future archive visitors to the most interesting parts. I will try and finish those tomorrow and put them on dropbox as well. I also contacted the photographer who took the really outstanding shots of the war memorials at Vic high and put them on flickr to ask for his permission to put them on the archive, so hopefully he gets back to me soon. Ben, I will email you his contact info.