If one or more of your relatives attended Concordia University in Montreal, you may want to check out their new online archival collection.
The university has been rebuilding its alumni archives, created from donations from past students and their relatives, in time the school’s 50th anniversary this year.
Concordia was created in 1974 through the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University.
The Records Management and Archives team has been digitizing samples of items in their collection and uploading them to Concordia’s Internet Archive collection.
The archival collection contains documents related to alumni from Loyola, Sir George Williams and Concordia. It focuses mainly on their activities while they were students. There is a variety of materials, such as textual documents, photographs, negatives and objects.
Searching the collection
If your relative attended Loyola or Sir George Williams before 1974, don’t despair. Some of the earliest documents available online include a letter, dated 1825, and an 1856 YMCA Annual Report. Also available are faculty newsletters, a 1959 Loyola yearbook, and a 1920 Loyola College Review.
When researching a relative, first search for their last name, although you probably won’t have much luck because there are a lot of photos and names of people that don’t appear in a search result.
Instead, try looking at some of the photos and documents created during the years your relative attended the university. Narrow down by year using the filters in the left margin.
Only interested in photos? Then, select Image in the Media Type filter in the left margin.
Even if you don’t find a specific reference to a relative, you can learn about student life at the time. For example, reading about the debating team in the June 1920 issue of the Loyola College Review, you’ll learn that the “lessons in elocution are beginning to bear their fruits.”
You can also conduct a text-content search on the Records Management and Archives web page.
Read more about the archivists’ work in Concordia’s article, New Concordia alumni archives collection documents student life through the ages.
