Read All About It!

One of the major Community Archives projects of 2020 has been the digitization of some of the newspapers in the collection. These range from titles where only a single issue survives, such as The Expositor  of 11 December 1857, pictured here, to long runs of newspapers such as The Weekly Ontario and Bay of Quinte Chronicle. This publication was in existence from 1841 to 1930, when its owner at the time, William Herbert Morton, bought The Intelligencer and the two newspapers merged.

The Community Archives holds several runs of The Weekly Ontario for complete years between 1913 and 1924. The newspaper covered local news, but it also included stories from the provincial, national and international spheres, in a way that is quite different from the local newspapers of today.

The front page of The Weekly Ontario  of 4 November 1920, for example, reported on the result of the United States’ presidential election, when Warren Harding won by a landslide.

These papers also report on hyper-local information, with details of personal illness and injuries and the arrival of out-of-town visitors that seem intrusive to a modern reader. If your family was living in Belleville or the Quinte area 100 years ago, you may well find information about them and their activities in these newly-digitized pages.

Over the course of this year's project we have been able to share more than 800 newspapers online. That's around 12,000 pages!

You can explore these local newspapers and their stories through our online catalogue at https://discover.cabhc.ca/newspaper-collection.