• What's to Celebrate in March
• Delta Heritage Inventory Books
• Converting Money to Money
• B. C. Sessional Papers
• Canadian Census Databases On-Line
• Everything Can Be Relevant (Home Children)
• Privacy Policy
• Back Issues

What are we celebrating this month? International Women's Day on March 8th? For historians, that would be an opportunity to go on about how we still fall short as far as according women their rightful place in the historical record. Then there's St. Patrick's Day on March 17th. Only slightly less deep in terms of controversy, so I won't go there. Happy March, anyway!

Additional Books Available on My Website

Effective immediately, the two volumes of Delta's Heritage Inventory are available for purchase by mail order on my website. "Delta's Rural Heritage" and "Delta's Urban Heritage" encompass the surviving built heritage of the Municipality of Delta in the southwest corner of the Lower Mainland of B.C.

Produced and published by Corporation of Delta, these volumes are the work of well-known and award-winning heritage consultant, Donald Luxton. Each address in Ladner (including Port Guichon), Tsawwassen and North Delta is accompanied by a photograph, as well as historic detail and description of architectural features.

Available for $25.00 each, including postage and handling, by cheque or money order. An order form, as well as views of the books, can be found at Corporation of Delta's Heritage books. This link will take you directly to the page where the books are displayed.

Converting Money to Money (for historical purposes only)

Ever wondered how to make dollar amounts from the 1900s meaningful in terms of current money values? This is something that has frequently crossed my mind, since I've been reading the local Delta newspaper for the period 1902 - 1914 on and off for the last decade. Question: how to appreciate the cost of groceries, for instance, in modern terms?

It turns out that there's no simple, straightforward answer. With help, I found a site on the Internet, which very swiftly makes a calculation based on the Consumer Price Index (Canada). The site is called Inflation Calculator - Bank of Canada and it can provide a calculation for any year from 1914 to 2000.

However, the Consumer Price Index applies only to certain purchases, namely, "food, shelter, furniture, clothing, transportation, and recreation." I was interested in the changing value of real estate over time, for which the Consumer Price Index is no help. Land prices are affected by a number of unique factors, some of which appear arbitrary, such as location, supply and demand, and the existence of services. I concluded that there was no easy (or even relatively easy) way for a non-mathematician to figure this out. If someone out there has a suggestion, I'd be happy to hear about it and pass it along.

B.C. Sessional Papers

I presented this subject at the February meeting of the Delta History Research group at the Delta Museum Annex. Information from that presentation will be shared in a future newsletter.

Canadian Census Databases On-Line

It looks as though eventually all the bits and pieces of the National Censuses (Canada) will be available on-line. Not to be too niggly or even ungrateful about the availability of information but it would be nice if these databases could be centralized thereby avoiding re-inventing the wheel. At the same time, I'm trying to break myself of the historian's habit of referring to these as "Manuscript Censuses."

A new site that I came across recently contains the 1881 Census for Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. It can be found at Vancouver Island Databases On-Line and originates at Malaspina College. The database is fully searchable and appears to be well laid out (but small print for those with bifocals like yours truly). It looks very promising for research on or in those areas. This project has been in the works a long time, as I remember hearing about it at a B. C. Studies Conference in the early 1990s.

Everything Can Be Relevant When You're Doing History

Although I'm not a genealogist, resources relating to that field occasionally catch my attention. One such resource is a book called, "Neither Waif Nor Stray: The Search For a Stolen Identity," written by Perry Snow, a fellow graduate of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. In it Perry describes his successful quest to uncover the family history of his father who had been sent to Canada in 1928 as a ward of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society.

I had been of the belief that the "farming out" of British Home Children was a phenomenon that occurred in the Prairies and Eastern Canada. But the concept of "farming out" struck a chord in my recollection of something read in the newspaper the bane of researchers: I know I read it somewhere, but where???

Thanks to a very rudimentary indexing system, I rooted out this item in The Weekly Optimist, 04 March 1926. For simplicity's sake, I have done away with the advertising format in which it originally appeared.

"The Immigration Department of the Salvation Army will receive a party of British boys, 14 to 18 years of age, for placing with farmers of British Columbia during the first part of April. For particulars write to Commandant Spearing, 75 7th Avenue East, Vancouver, B.C."

Since Delta was primarily a farming area, it would be reasonable to assume that some of these boys were placed in this district. Whether that occurred we have no way of knowing, since nothing appeared afterward in the newspaper to that effect. And it will forever remain a mystery unless someone is at work ferreting out that information.

The next reference appeared in The Weekly Optimist on 14 February 1929, advertising the availability of "British farm laborers, married, single, experienced and inexperienced, also boys" as part of a larger effort to "Make Canada British." The success of this appeal was indicated two weeks later by the following summary from the Delta Board of Trade: "The government finding that there is not sufficient demand for British boys for farm work has decided to leave this in abeyance for a year."

Privacy

Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone. In fact, you will notice that it does not appear on the copy of the newsletter that is sent to everyone on the list. But, if you wish to unsubscribe, let me know by e-mail.

Back Issues

Available on request.

Gwen Szychter, M.A.

P.S. If you have questions or there are subjects that you would like to see explored here, please send me an e-mail.

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