Thanks to the Acadian & French-Canadian Genealogy & History Facebook group, I learned about the Canadian photos and images in the New York Public Library’s online digital collection, NYPLDigitalCollections.
NYPLDigitalCollections is a Beta site that contains more than 800,000 images. A note on the website says, “The Library is re-imagining access to materials digitized from its vast holdings. This new area of the NYPL website will be evolving in the open over the coming months.”
A quick search of “Montreal” and “Canada” in the digital collection resulted in several interesting images. These images can serve as a resource for genealogy research and family history writing.
A search for “Coaticook,” a town in southeastern Quebec, revealed portraits of two women.
After you click on a thumbnail image to enlarge it, make sure you scroll down to read details about it. Sometimes there is a link to more items in that collection.
Canadian menus
A collection of menus soon preoccupied my attention and made writing this blog post a longer process than aniticipated because I was distracted by what I discovered.
I first came upon the menus when I entered “Montreal” in the search box.
In addition to photos and post cards, I found a selection of late 19th-century menus from the Windsor Hotel, including a luncheon menu from September 15, 1891. While I have no idea if my ancestors dined at the Windsor Hotel that day, I do have a sense of the food that may have whet their appetite. (See image below.)
Perhaps my ancestors would have started with a cock-a-leekie soup. Then, one of them may have chosen beef tongue or corned beef and cabbage for the main course. To top it off, among the several desserts offered, they may have selected wine jelly or rice pudding.
The Windsor Hotel menu is one of more than 13,000 menus from around the world in the library’s Miss Frank E. Buttolph Collection.
To find out if there were other menus from Canada, I clicked on Buttolph Collection of Menus in the details that appear below the Windsor Hotel menu.
To narrow down my search within the menu collection, I entered “Canada” in the search box. That way, I found menus from Quebec City’s Chateau Frontenac Hotel (1937), Toronto’s King Edward Hotel (1905), and a Masonic banquet in Dawson (1901), I also discovered the menu offered aboard the Empress of Canada on October 28, 1936.
For some reason, entering “Canada” did not turn up all the Canadian menus. So, I tried another tactic.
Going back to the main Buttolph Collection of Menus, I entered the names of cities and provinces. When I entered Saskatchewan, menus for the Hotel Saskatchewan appeared. “Vancouver” also uncovered menus.
As with all digitial collections, it pays to explore. The next thing you know, it will be past your dinner time.
You can visit the NYPLDigitalCollections here.
The Buttolph collection of menus is here.
Luncheon menu, The Windsor Hotel, Montreal, 15 September 1891. Image 474661. Miss Frank E. Buttolph Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections.
