Between the Pages
Hands hold copies of old school textbooks.
Image courtesy the Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa
While researching in the Archives, it’s easy to get so engrossed that you lose a sense of where you even are, let alone the historical context of what you’re holding! Sometimes, certain indicators—a scrap-paper bookmark here, a scribble on that corner—will pop out at just the right time, serving as immediate reminders of the people who used, owned, and, in many cases, loved these items. While the exact dates or authors of these personal touches can be hard to pin down, these small treasures can sometimes humanize the residents of Lethbridge’s past more than any catalogue or municipal record.
This short grocery list, nestled between the pages of the 1975 Eaton’s Fall/Winter catalogue, was my first encounter with one of these. In order, the list calls for margarine, canned tomatoes, ice cream, spaghetti, and eggs. Using old grocery store flyers, it’s actually quite easily to determine how much this grocery run would have cost in late 1975 (then sob about how times have changed); altogether, it would have been worth roughly $8!
Doodles and notes inside an old school book.
Image courtesy the Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa
Doodles and notes inside an old school book.
Image courtesy the Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa
Doodles and notes inside an old school book.
Image courtesy the Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa
A similar handwritten note was folded in the 1910 Alberta Public School Speller, outlining six benefits from crop-planting earlier in the day; perhaps an assignment for an unwilling child, or the result of an exhausted mother trying to motivate herself. Regardless of the paper’s origin, potentially its most charming characteristic is its other side which is full of doodles, and a writer double-checking their spelling of the word “parallel.”
Another collection of scribbles will prove especially familiar to former sarcastic preteens; the front page of an Albertan grammar book, in which many of the writer’s relatives are left with insults underneath their name (“you dummy” being a personal favourite)! Someone named Lily gets an especially short end of the stick; not only are we told that the portrait “in the upper right hand corner”—a pig—is actually a photograph of Lily, but we are also (rather illustratively) told that she is “as graceful as a swan.” It’s a sweet statement in theory, but given the book’s prior comments, it’s a difficult claim to take at face value!
The last of this commentary doubles as the most succinct. In response to the schoolbook’s grammar example of “what is the matter with Jean?” it says simply: “She is crazy.”
Signs of prior ownership can also be much subtler; checkmarks and “X”s, for example, can be found throughout many old schoolbooks. This is certainly the most common kind of scribble one can find in old personal documents!
To conduct research, learn more about the Galt Archives, or see some of these doodles for yourself, visit galtmuseum.com/research!
Dr. Frank Hamilton Mewburn was a wiry and fiery surgeon, politician, army officer, and university professor who greatly contributed to the development of Lethbridge. Mewburn came from a long ling of medical professionals, graduating from McGill University in Montreal in 1881.