Several thousand historic photographs of Smithers and the surrounding Bulkley Valley in British Columbia are available on the Bulkley Valley Museum’s Collections Online website.
Thanks to a $15,000 grant from Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program, the museum has opened its vaults and made much of its collections accessible online.
In addition to 5,000 digitized photos, the website contains records for more than 3,000 archival and museum holdings.
Alfred Smithers, Mr. Deer, Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Hergs, and Charles Melville Hays at Portage la Prairie station, 1910. Source: Bulkley Valley Museum, Smithers, British Columbia, P0687.
Search or browse
You can search the website with keywords or browse a selection of popular topics, such as railroads, telegraphs, Smithers Main Street, Hazelton, farming, and even New Additions. Once you enter your keywords, you can narrow your search by decade, subject, place, and media type.
Cross-Canada images
An interesting, but small, photo collection is The Smithers in Canada Tour when Sir Alfred Smithers travelled across the country in about 1910. Sir Alfred was chairman of Grand Trunk Pacific at the time, and the town was named after him.
Artifacts
Images of the museum’s artifacts also make interesting viewing for family historians curious to know what an early 20th-century iron, gas stove, or tobacco tin looked like.
Crowdsourcing information
At some point, the museum hopes to start crowdsourcing information about some of the photographs and identify people in them.
Applying for a grant
The deadline for the 2017-2018 funding cycle for Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program ends January 27, 2017.
A link to the grant program guidelines is available in this blog post, 21 ways to increase your non-profit’s chances of receiving a grant.
