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BRYMNER, DOUGLAS,
politician, journalist, and civil servant; b. 3 July 1823 in Greenock,
Scotland, son of Alexander Brymner and Elizabeth Fairlie; m. there 1853
Jean Thomson, and they had nine children; d. 19 June 1902 in New
Westminster, B.C., and was buried in Ottawa.
The fourth son of a banker and one-time editor of the Greenock
Intelligencer, Douglas Brymner received his early education at the
Greenock Grammar School. In the late 1840s he worked as a shipping agent
and in 1850 he joined his brother Graham in the operation of a coal and
lime business in Greenock, but ill health and overwork forced him to
withdraw in 1856. The following year he immigrated to Canada with his
wife and son. They settled at Melbourne, Lower Canada, where Brymner
made an unsuccessful attempt at farming. Active in church and community
affairs, he served two terms as mayor there. He turned to journalism and
in 1864 moved his family to Montreal, where he assumed the editorship of
the Presbyterian; at the same time he joined the editorial staff of the
Montreal Herald and for a time represented it in the parliamentary press
gallery in Ottawa. Brymner retained both editorial positions until the
spring of 1872, when he left for Ottawa. He had accepted an appointment
to the Department of Agriculture as clerk in charge of archives.
The impetus to collect and preserve records and documents pertaining to
Canada’s past originated with the Literary and Historical Society of
Quebec, which, led by Henry Hopper Miles, had petitioned parliament in
March 1871 for the establishment of an archive. The next year $4,000 was
placed in the estimates of the Department of Agriculture for an
investigation of archives in Canada. On 1 June Brymner took up his
appointment, which was formally established by order in council on 20
June.
Thus, at age 48, Brymner made a fresh start in a new career, in an
enterprise that was little understood and vaguely defined. The reasons
for his selection are not clear. He had no connection with the Literary
and Historical Society, though he appears to have had a general interest
in historical matters. Whatever his qualifications, he tackled his new
responsibilities with intelligence and enthusiasm. In three empty rooms
in the basement of the west block on Parliament Hill, with no staff and
not a single document in his custody, Brymner began what he described as
“a task of more than ordinary difficulty.”
In his first year Brymner visited provincial capitals and other cities
in search of old records that rightly belonged in Ottawa. In Montreal he
discovered a cache of union-period financial records and in Halifax he
investigated a collection of British military material, some 400,000
documents, that was destined for shipment to England. Brymner negotiated
with British authorities and the records were transferred to Ottawa.
Nothing would match the size or significance of this acquisition for
many years to come.
Brymner went to London in 1873 and knocked on doors throughout the city,
visiting the War Office, the Colonial Office, the Hudson’s Bay Company,
the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and even the Tower of
London in search of material relating to Canada. He recommended to
agriculture minister John Henry Pope that such documents in Britain be
copied and bound for deposit in the archives. This recommendation was
confirmed by Abbé Hospice-Anthelme-Jean-Baptiste Verreau, who had also
been sent by the government in 1873 to search out material in Europe,
strangely without knowledge at first of Brymner’s mission. But little
was done to promote archival work during the lean middle years of the
1870s. Since Brymner had no staff to assist him and his meagre budget
was reduced, he remained in Ottawa, where he painstakingly indexed most
of the British military collection.
By 1880, this task completed, a rejuvenated Brymner once again turned
his attention to acquisition. Following visits to Britain in 1881 and
1883, and to France in the latter year, he initiated a program of
copying at the Public Record Office in London and directed his first
assistant, Joseph-Étienne-Eugène Marmette, to begin investigative work
in Paris on records relating to the French regime. The copying of Sir
Frederick Haldimand’s papers at the British Museum, begun modestly in
1878, was pursued in earnest four years later. Transcription was tedious
and beset with problems. Brymner was a perfectionist and he personally
inspected all copies as they arrived in Ottawa. Constantly annoyed by
errors, sloppy handwriting, poor binding, and delays in transmittal, he
experimented with photography as a means of duplicating documents.
Brymner’s systematic approach to acquisition expanded at home too. In
the early 1880s he approached the families of those who had been
involved in early events in Canadian history for donations of papers and
records. He also started to build a library of books, newspapers,
journals, association reports, government publications, and pamphlets,
his objective being the creation of a great storehouse of Canadiana. To
make his collections known, he decided to summarize or calendar them and
publish the information in the archives’ annual reports. He started in
1881 with the Haldimand papers, a task that would take him 14 years to
complete, and continued with the state papers for Upper and Lower
Canada. Researchers took note. Genealogists, antiquarians, historians
such as William Kingsford, and government officials turned to Brymner
for historical advice.
In the 1890s the copying work in Britain continued to occupy Brymner’s
attention and was responsible for half of the archives’ annual
expenditure during most of the decade. Similar work commenced in Paris.
Approaching his 70th year, Brymner flirted with retirement, but he found
it difficult to break away from the archives. In the fall of 1892 he
moved to London to continue the search for documents; he would remain in
Britain until the summer of 1894. While there, he investigated
record-keeping practices in the British government and in other European
countries, including Belgium, France, and Germany. Since 1875 in Ottawa
Henry James Morgan had been serving as keeper of the records in the
Department of the Secretary of State, where he too collected older
government records. Brymner’s study of foreign archives may have been
motivated by a desire to end the rivalry and consolidate archival
operations. His recommendation that a single record office be
established fell on deaf ears until the spring of 1897. In February of
that year the west block had been ravaged by fire and though no archival
records were destroyed, Brymner’s holdings suffered some water damage.
The loss by a number of departments of operational records prompted the
government to appoint a commission of inquiry to investigate the state
of public records. Following Brymner’s advice, it recommended the
consolidation of all archival records. Yet Brymner’s dream of a properly
constituted records office would not be realized until 1903, a year
after his death.
Brymner’s personal life revolved around family and church. In Melbourne
and Montreal he had been a prominent Presbyterian, serving as an elder
at annual synod in 1858, 1861, 1864, 1867, and 1868. However, because of
his opposition to the union of Presbyterian churches in Canada in the
1870s, he joined the Church of England. He was a founding member and
later a warden of St Barnabas’ Church in Ottawa. After his wife’s death
in 1884, he remained close to his family. He died in 1902 while he was
visiting his son George Douglas, a banker in New Westminster. Of the
four sons and one daughter who survived him, the best known is William,
a renowned artist. When William had moved to Paris in 1878 to study
painting, he was liberally supported by his father, who later acted as
his agent in Ottawa.
As head of the Canadian archives for 30 years, Brymner amassed an
impressive library of books and pamphlets, and over 3,100 volumes of
hand-copied and bound manuscripts. Because he was restricted by
appropriations that remained unchanged, and inadequate, until the mid
1890s and often worked alone (Marmette and his successor, Édouard
Richard, spent much of their time in France), Brymner’s accomplishment
is all the more impressive. Acutely aware of the value of history, he
realized that there could be no study without raw materials and so he
dedicated himself to building collections that would allow historical
research, and the historical profession in Canada, to expand and
flourish. In recognition of his efforts, Queen’s College in Kingston
awarded him an lld in 1892 and three years later he was elected a fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada. Brymner’s legacy can be found in the
annual reports of the archives, especially those published after 1882.
The calendars and analyses of documents prepared by Brymner alone amount
to more than 10,000 printed pages in the volumes that appeared between
1883 and 1902. Although the institution remained small throughout his
tenure, Douglas Brymner alone was responsible for creating a solid
foundation for Canada’s national archives.
Glenn Wright
The early development of the Canadian archives may be traced in a series
of reports appended to the minister of agriculture’s annual reports for
1872 to 1903, available in Can., Parl., Sessional papers, 1873–1904.
Douglas Brymner’s preliminary findings of 1872 and 1873 appear in the
Sessional papers for 1873 and 1874 respectively, and H.-A.-[J.-] B.
Verreau’s “Report of proceedings connected with Canadian archives in
Europe” in those for 1875. After 1882 the appendices were also issued
separately as Report on Canadian archives (Ottawa). Brymner prepared the
reports for 1883–1901. A description of the early reports and their
contents is provided in Index to reports of Canadian archives from 1872
to 1908 (Ottawa, 1909), published by the Canadian Archives (now the NA).
Douglas Brymner’s other publications cover a wide variety of topics. He
is the author of two poems, “Charms of country life: an imitation,” in
Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly and National Rev. (Toronto), 2
(January–June 1879): 429–30, and The twa mongrels: a modern eclogue
(Toronto, 1876), issued under the pseudonym Tummas Treddles. An article,
“The battle of Stoney Creek,” appears in the Hamilton Assoc., Journal
and Proc. ([Hamilton, Ont.]), no.11 (1894–95): 36–44, and two others
were published in the RSC Trans.: “The Jamaica maroons – how they came
to Nova Scotia – how they left it,” 2nd ser., 1 (1895), sect.ii: 81–90,
and “The death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” 2 (1896), sect. ii: 33–39.
His output also comprises a number of pamphlets, including Property and
civil rights ((Ottawa], 1880) and two issued anonymously “by a Quebec
Liberal”: Remarks on reciprocity and the Thornton–Brown memorandum
(Montreal, 1874) and Commercial union: a study ([Ottawa?, 1888?]).
Several concern his opposition to Presbyterian church union:
Presbyterian union: a help to the intelligent discussion of the
question; by an elder (Toronto, 1873), Faults and failures of the late
Presbyterian union in Canada (London, Ont., 1879), Endowments of the
Church of Scotland in Canada; evidence of Mr. Douglas Brymner before the
Senate committee on private bills . . . (Toronto, 1883); he also issued
a broadside on the same subject, Church of Scotland’s endowment
([Ottawa?, 1882?]), prepared jointly with T. A. McLean.
Finally, Brymner prepared translations from the French of Emile Petitot,
Monograph of the Dènè-Dindjié Indians (n.p., [1878]) and Monograph of
the Esguimaux Tchiglit of the Mackenzie and of the Anderson ([Montreal,
1878]); and J.-C. Taché, The Colorado potato beetle (Chrysomela
decemlineata) and how to oppose its ravages ([Ottawa], 1880).
Among these contributions may be especially mentioned a
number of translations of the "Odes of Horace" into Scotch verse.
Here are some of his
reports...
Faults and Failures of the Late
Presbyterian Union in Canada (pdf)
Intercepted Letters to the Duke de Mirepoix, 1756
Before his resignation from the Commission, Dr. Douglas Brymner,
Archivist of the Dominion of Canada, selected from the materials under
his command the following letters, and had them copied for the
Commission (pdf)
The Jamaica Maroons
How they came to Nora Scotia — How they left it (pdf)
Monograph of the Déné - Dindjié Indians
By the Rev. E. Petitot, Oslay Missionary, translated by Douglas Brymner
(pdf)
Canadian Archive
Reports
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
This issue concludes the work of Douglas
Brymner
1903
Tables of the Trade and Navigation of the
Dominion of Canada for the Fiscal Year ended June 1903
1904
Introduction by the new archivist
To the Honourable
Sydney A. Fisher, M.P.,
Minister of Agiiculture.
Sir,—Soon after my appointment as Dominion Archivist and
Keeper of the Records in May last, I commenced to inquire into the
arrangements in operation for the collection, classification and safe
keeping of the public records, with the view of preparing a preliminary
report on the subject. As the various series of papers deposited in
the Archives Branch of your department comprise only a small portion of
the records now nominally in my custody, it is convenient, for the
purpose of this report, to divide them into two classes: (A) The
documents collected under the direction of the late Dr. Brymner; (B) The
numerous collections of original papers at present deposited
in different departments, which are to be incorporated with class “A”.
According to the report of my predecessor, published in
the year 1872, “A petition was presented to the Parliament of the
Dominion, setting forth that authors and literary enquirers were placed
in a very disadvantageous position in this country, as compared with
persons of the same class in Great Britain, France and the United
States, in consequence of being practically debarred from facilities of
access to the public records, documents and official papers, in
manuscript, illustrative of the progress of society in Canada, and
praying that steps be taken to have the Archives of Canada collected.”
To a limited extent, the prayer of the petitioners has
been granted, and we have now deposited in the Archives Branch a useful
collection of papers, which illustrate, in an impel feet manner, certain
phases of our history. But when we take a comprehensive survey of the
sources of information within our grasp, and of the requirements of
the modern historian, we find that our storehouse needs replenishing;
that at present we are unable to keep pace with the spirit of inquiry
which during the last half century, in particular, has so vigorously
asserted itself in the United States and in Europe, and has long been
felt in Canada. A great change has taken place in the method of
writing history. Formerly, a concrete, categorical history, even if it
were possible, would not have been welcomed as it is to-day. A
picturesque presentation of the outward and visible signs—the landmarks
of history—in which facts were subordinate to the temper or inclination
of the writer, found favour; and often a re-arrangement or
reproduction of accepted facts was sufficient, since the public was not
prepared for anything save the conventional. But, with the larger
freedom of the individual, the scope of history has been broadened, and
there is a desire and a determination on the part of competing
historians to deal with everything that tends to elucidate the life of
the past. In Canada it is apparent, even to the least observant, .that
there is a steady growth of national feeling ; and as the strength of
national life must depend upon the vitality of its component parts, it
is only natural to find a desire to ascertain the accurate proportion of
individual effort in those measures which have contributed to the
welfare of the whole community. With the realization of citizenship, and
the recognition of individual influence in the progress of human
affairs, the importance of the individual has increased, and the records
of men which a by-gone age would have ignored, are now invested with
ever
increasing interest. In the more important documents of
state we may find the expression of the voice of the people; but from
local records and semi-private papers, we may construct a vivid picture
of the temper, habits and aspirations of the people, and may follow,
stage by stage, the evolutions which have brought about movements of
political and economic change. By the collection of these records in
organized centres substantial additions are constantly being made to our
storehouse of knowledge. The barrier so long opposed to the revelation
of truth has been broken down, and we have been admitted behind the
scenes. Throughout the civilized world the past is being studied from
the records of the men who made its history, rather than in the lives of
those whom accident or choice may have identified with the prominence of
the country. This wider field of inquiry has imposed new
responsibilities upon Governments as the custodians of national
archives. Papers are gathered and preserved at the public expense, which
at one time would have been left to private enterprise; and facilities
of access are now demanded where they would once have been accorded
solely as a favour.
To the modern historian this change presents many
difficulties. Canada is still a young country, hardly conscious of its
strength, or of the brilliant future towards which it is pressing. In
the three Centuries of its activity it has passed through many
vicissitudes ; has emerged from violent struggles, has suffered severe
shocks. The history of these three centuries is crowded with detail; its
course has run in widely divergent directions, and the issue of its
warfare has had such far-reaching effects, that it forms an absorbing
study. Innumerable influences have left their impress upon the
features of our national life. Justice demands that the progress of each
should be defined, in order that their mutual action may be faithfully
appreciated. At the threshold of his subject, therefore, the historian
is confronted with a mass of detail which he finds it impossible to
co-ordinate in one comprehensive work, whatever may be the range of
his intellect or the length of his years. Selection is open to him ;
but, in order to work out his scheme intelligently he is forced to
attribute to certain influences or tendencies, a prominence to which
they have no claim. And when the defects of his work are discovered by
the specialist or critic, the author is accused of ignorance or of
partiality ; when, in reality, he has simply attempted an impossible
task. Specialization, therefore, becomes imperative, and to meet this
requirement of the age the enquirer turns naturally towards those
institutions from which he can draw the information desired. Oft times
by the light of new evidence he will be able to show how far opinions
have supplied the place of facts, whilst documents which would have
permitted the age to speak for itself have been buried in obscurity; or,
in sympathy with a spirit which has fostered the suppression of truth,
jealously guarded from the touch of profane hands. The desirability of
collecting our archives, and of rendering them available to the public
with all reasonable promptitude, should, I think, commend itself to the
people of the Dominion, since an accurate knowledge of its past may
become an important factor in its future development. All those who have
studied our written history closely, and are at all familiar with the
amount of unassimilated material concerning every age, will, I believe,
frankly admit that it is unsatisfactory. Written from so many
standpoints, and necessarily based upon insufficient evidence, no
uniformity exists or is possible. And yet it is upon this imperfect, and
oft times narrow view of the past, that our text books are formed and
our youth are examined for academic honours. Much sterling work has been
accomplished by Canadian historians which will forever remain as a
monument to them. The cardinal points of our history may remain
unchanged; but the full, true history of men, of their motives, and of
their influence on the progress of this great country, which is now
beginning to take its proper place amongst the nations of the world, can
be fully appreciated only in the light of documents which at present, to
the great majority, are unknown. There are many students in each
Province of the Dominion who are engaged in independent research; men
who have kept in touch more or less with the work done by my
predecessor, and by others in a smaller way. Each must have felt the
need of a national history, based upon the most ample documentary
evidence. The inauguration of a work of this nature by the Universities,
with the co-operation of the Government, might possibly commend itself
as a fitting movement to mark the passing in 1908, of the third century
of the birth of Canada. What we need at present are facilities which
will permit the location and collection of documents now scattered
throughout the Dominion and in foreign lands. These records would enable
the student to prepare exhaustive monographs ; and when we have gathered
the stones, Canada will not be wanting in master craftsmen capable of
hewing them into shape and of giving them artistic form—of converting
them into a history worthy of the Canadian people and of their splendid
heritage.
That portions of our history have still to be written,
and that much of it needs to be recast, is not extraordinary. Countries
which were already old at the birth of Canada have considered it
advisable to remodel their history. In England,’ with its settled
institutions and its masterpieces of historical literature, a work of
this kind was planned by the late Lord Acton, professor of history at
Cambridge, and is now being published under the auspices of the
University. In the preface to the first volume this passage occurs,
which I think is applicable to our own case :—
“The printing of archives has kept pace with the
admission of enquirers; and the total mass of new matter which the last
half century has accumulated, amounts to thousands of volumes. In view
of changes and gains such as these, it has become impossible for the
historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even
to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds
himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of
historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous
transactions, periodicals and official publications, in order to reach
the truth.”
I Students of Canadian history owe a debt of gratitude
for the labours of the late Dr. Brymner, who, in the face of
difficulties, now happily in part removed, succeeded in gathering a
collection of national papers, which have opened up new fields of
enquiry, have stimulated individual research, and have directed
widespread attention to the value of records of the past. But Dr.
Brymner was not a mere collector of manuscripts. During the thirty years
of his tenure of the office of Archivist he was forever ready to direct
historical research, and he placed at the service of the student his
sound judgment and ripe intelligence. His published reports of the
Archives are yearly increasing in value, and will remain as a monument
to a competent and faithful public servant. It is true that the
classification of the documents is defective, and a general index to the
volumes in the office is wanting. In the lifetime of Dr. Brymner,
however, the want of facilities of reference did not interfere with
efficient service, as the greater part of the documents had passed
through his hands and could be readily found. And I am convinced, that
with the limited means at his disposal and the slender staff of
assistants at his command, any greater attention to detail must have
been made at the sacrifice of the work, all important at the time, of
collecting new material.
The public utility of this office was not at first
recognized; and at the time of its organization there was no desire on
the part of the departments to divest themselves of important papers
which would have been of great service to literary men. From time to
time attention has been called to the unsatisfactory state of the public
records; but reforms can only be effected slowly, as many conditions
operate against radical changes, however, desirable they may^be. An
important step was taken by the Government in the year 1897, when His
Excellency the Governor General approved of a report of a Committee of
the Honourable the Privy Council, recommending the appointment of the
Deputy Minister of Finance, The Auditor General and the Under Secretary
of State, to be a Departmental Commission to report to the Treasury
Board upon the state of the public records.
The commissioners, Messrs. Courtney, McDougall and Pope,
made an inspection of the numerous repositories of departmental records,
and embodied the result of their investigations in an excellent report,
published in the year 1898. Unfortunately, their inquiry was limited to
the departments only ; but it would appear to be in the public interest
that their powers should be enlarged, and that periodical inspections
should be made of all repositories containing records of the Crown.
The words of the Commissioners will illustrate the
condition of affairs which then existed—a condition slightly improved at
the present time.
“Throughout their inspection the commissioners were
impressed with the lack of any community of plan amongst the several
departments for the arrangement and preservation of their records. As a
rule departmental papers of two or three years back were convenient of
access. Those of older date are commonly relegated to the basement
(apparently rather as lumber to be got rid of than as records to be
preserved) where they are stored, often under conditions eminently
unfavourable for their preservation, and in some departments particular
classes of papers are destroyed after periods varying from three to ten
years. In the majority of instances, however, they remain indefinitely
in underground rooms, growing more and more difficult of access as
fresh accumulations are added to the store. This condition is due to the
want of a uniform system throughout the service for the disposal of
records, and is aggravated by the crowded state of the departments which
are. gradually becoming choked with an ever increasing mass of
documents.”
“The above remarks apply to public documents generally.
As regards the older papers of historic interest which form the archives
of the country, the undersigned are unable to speak more favourably. It
is true that there is a collection of valuable papers bearing on the
early history of Canada in the Department of Agriculture, under
the control of an official known as the Dominion Archivist, but this
official though being amply qualified for the post, has never been
provided with facilities for its adequate administration, nor enjoyed
anything beyond a casual and perfunctory recognition. The Department of
the Secretary of State possesses a similar collection of papers
under the immediate charge of an officer known as ‘The Keeper of
Records’. These two branches of the public service though ostensibly
devoted to the promotion of a common object, are not in any sense of the
word auxiliary to each other. On the contrary, they are distinct, and
even antagonistic. The commissioners, for instance, understand that for
the purpose of bridging over breaks in the archives copies have been
made in the libraries of European capitals, when the originals of these
very documents were at the time in the custody of one or the other of
the public departments. It is not too much to say that the rivalry
existing between these offices has long been an obstacle to
the attainment of the unity and responsibility of control essential to
the introduction of a perfect system. Another collection of state papers
relating to the century immediately preceding confederation exists in
the Privy Council Office, and there are many minor deposits, to one of
which reference may be made. In the Department of Indian affairs the
commissioners were shown a number of bound volumes of manuscript
containing the reports of the Indian Commissioners at Albany, from
1722-23, and amongst other matters of historic interest, the story in
part of the Mohawk war and the conspiracy of Pontiac and the migration
of the Six Nation Indians. These books are quite unprotected from fire
and their destruction would be a serious loss. Thus records, which
united, would form a collection of rare interest, are dispersed
throughout the departments, suffering more or less from damp, their
value sometimes unrecognized and their very existence, it may be,
unknown. Nor is it surprising, when it is borne in mind that until the
fire in February last the care of records was not considered a matter of
immediate concern.
“Recent experience must have taught all persons, as it
has greatly impressed the undersigned with the conviction, that the
danger from fire to which the public records are exposed is a serious
and ever present one. On every hand the undersigned found
that, owing to lack of adequate protection, records and documents,
valuable and otherwise, are not only constantly exposed to the risk of
fire, but are in themselves a source of danger. The wooden cupboards and
pine shelving almost universally used in the departments are a constant
menace, and the frequent utilization of the corridors for storage space
is a practice fraught with peril. Thus the protection sought to be
afforded by fireproof rooms and buildings is impacted by reason of the
fittings being of combustible material.”
To this report the commissioners added a memorandum of
the papers which they considered should be removed to the central
office, viz:—
‘1. Everything in the Archives Branch of the Department
of Agriculture.
‘2. Everything in the Records Branch in the Department of
the Secretary of State, other than departmental files and letter books
of later date than June 30, 1867, lodged there for convenience.
‘3. Everything in the Privy Council Office of date
anterior to July 1, 1867.
‘4. Correspondence of the Provincial Secretary of Canada
in the Department of Finance, and elsewhere.
‘5. Papers in the Militia department, or elsewhere,
having reference to the war of 1812 and the rebellion of 1837.
‘6. Documents bearing upon the early history of the
Rideau and Welland canals, whether in the Department of Railways and
Canals, or in the Department of the Interior or elsewhere.
‘7. Documents in the Department of Justice, or elsewhere,
relating to the risings in the North-west, and also those touching the
Fenian raids.
‘8. Bound manuscript volumes containing reports of the
Indian Commissioners at Albany and elsewhere, dating from 1722, now in
the Department of Indian Affairs, also the original surrenders from the
various tribes.
‘9. Papers in the Department of Marine and Fisheries
relating to the Behring sea seal fisheries and other international
questions, as the subjects to which they relate are disposed of.’
An Order in-Council based upon the recommendations of the
commissioners was passed in 1903, providing for the papers to be
‘assembled in one place and put into the custody of one person, and so
arranged and classified as to be easily accessible to all persons
interested therein
In the same instrument it is further set forth, ‘ That it
shall be the duty of the said Dominion Archivist and Keeper of the
Records, under the direction of the Minister of Agriculture, to keep and
preserve the archives of Canada and such other documents records and
data as may tend to promote a knowledge of the history of Canada
and furnish a record of events of historical interest therein, and to
that end and for the greater safety in their preservation and
convenience in referring thereto, that the documents, records and papers
mentioned and described in said appendix ‘A’, hereinbefore referred to
and such others as may from time to time be determined by Your
Excellency.
in Council, he collected from the several places in which
they are now respectively deposited, and placed in the custody of the
said Dominion Archivist and Keeper of the records who shall thereupon
under the direction, as aforesaid, be the custodian thereof.’
This, briefly, is the principal movement that has been
made in recent years to centralize the Dominion archives. A precedent
for the measures which are now being taken by the government is found in
the action of the Intendant Hocquart, in 1731, and in the proceedings
and reports of the committee under Lord Dorchester, in 1787. As the
papers are amongst those which have been transferred to this office, I
have arranged them for publication herewith. They give a good idea of
the extent of the archives in the first years of British rule, and they
may furnish a basis for the investigations that may be made in
connection with the preparation of a guide. Extracts from the
proceedings were printed in 1791, but the complete reports, with
additions to 1799, are here given.
In the meantime I have taken such steps as
were possible within the short time that has elapsed since the date of
my appointment, to ascertain what other sources were available in Canada
and elsewhere. My work in this direction is necessarily incomplete. One
result of this investigation to date, may be mentioned, namely, that a
whole series of State papers hive been transcribed for our archives from
copies in Europe, while the original documents, in excellent
preservation, were at the same time in Canada. These papers were not
included in the report of the commissioners. Scattered throughout the
Dominion there are numerous collections of papers which it may be
impracticable to obtain, or even difficult to copy within a reasonable
time. I believe, however, that a useful purpose would be served if they
were examined. In connection with this subject, I beg to suggest that a-
competent assistant should be appointed, charged with an examination of
the collection of documents to be found in the Dominion, and that he be
authorized to prepare a report thereon under the direction of this
office, in the form of a guide to the documentary sources of information
relating to Canada, at present in this country. A work of this kind
would facilitate research in every part of the Dominion, it would
ofttimes prevent the copying of duplicates, and it would relieve this
office of many inquiries in the future.
1905a
1905b
1905c
1906 |
