School history goes on the record
Project digitalizes century-old attendance records from Colchester County schools
“Bringing things to the digital age is important for preservation ...”
Jessica Neil
Collections co-ordinator
Colchester’s museum is taking rollcall, so to speak.
Generations of school attendance records from Colchester County schools are being safely stored in special boxes and also saved in digital format.
“Bringing things to the digital age is important for preservation and it’s something that we’re able to do even more of,” said Jessica Neil, the collections co-ordinator at the Colchester Historeum and Archives in downtown Truro.
In the process, the local history base is poised to become an even greater resource for residents wanting information about specific communities and schools, some of which no longer exist under their original names.
“It’s definitely an option now, and easier to navigate and find things” from the century-old school records, Neil said. “They kind of sat forgotten for a while, but now 100 years ago and earlier is going to be digitalized.”
Booklets containing a wealth of scholastic data became museum property about 20 years ago, she said, but they were tucked away in old boxes and not readily available to the public, nor necessarily being preserved for the long term.
“They’ve been sitting in boxes, and no one has really had the time or money to sort them out. And so, my predecessor, Ashley Sutherland, applied for this grant and we were able to hire someone whose sole focus is on these school records and digitalizing them and rehousing them.”
The museum’s archives digitalization assistant, Ryan McLellan of Truro, is finding innovative and modern ways to not only store information for the long haul, but also to make it more useful and practical for public access.
It’s a big project.
“Oh yes, there’s 16,000 records — in that ballpark — in 162 boxes,” Neil said of the school collection. “One of the biggest priorities is rehousing them into acid-free boxes and making sure that we’re following good preservation protocols, so that they last longer. We like those originals.
“Ryan is organizing the information and doing a little bit of research on the communities and the schools that are mentioned. Before, they were kind of community (school listings) in random order. Now, he’s putting them in order alphabetically, so that will make it much easier to navigate (the archives).”
The vast collection from the entire Colchester region covers school attendance records from as far back as 1890 and spanning as recently as 1970.
“Right now, we can only show anything that is older than 100 years, because there is a privacy law,” Neil said. “So, for now, it’s 1920s and earlier.
“You do get a really good idea of how (education) progressed throughout the years and things changed. Even from some communities that don’t technically exist anymore under those names. That was some of the hardship, figuring out what community it was and where it was. But that is what Ryan is working on these days.”
Although they’re listed as attendance records, the school booklets contained an even greater glimpse into the lives of students, their families and the communities those people called home.
“There’s a booklet per class,” Neil said. “You would have maybe five or six booklets per school, depending on what grade levels the school taught at the time.
“It would have information about book allowances, fire drills, stuff like that that the teacher would need to know. The students’ names are written down the side, along with their attendance for the whole year. We get the child’s full name, their birthday, their grade, if they graduated to the next level, and their parents’ names are there, so that’s kind of interesting.”
It’s all useful information for genealogy enthusiasts trying to connect the dots when researching family history.
“A lot of it, over the years, has been people coming in for citizenship research and just finding proof of family and names and stuff,” said Neil, who oversees all artifacts and archives housed at the historeum.
She was born and raised in Valley, so information about schools in and around that Colchester County community were of personal interest to her. North River Elementary School was particularly noteworthy for Neil.
“The majority of my family is from North River,” she said.
“I have seen my uncles in the records, just casually flipping through. It does make it a little more exciting (to make that connection).”
Just as birth and church archival records are helpful links to more information in genealogical research, the aging school data gives Colchester residents a mirror on the past.
“If you’re looking for someone specific, you can pinpoint where they (resided) and when they were there,” Neil said. “And if they moved to, say Stewiacke, you could kind of follow them.”
It all amounts to not only a cornerstone of Colchester history, but also fodder for discussion about yesteryear.
“Yeah, especially for history nerds like us,” Neil said with a laugh.