By Taylor Murray

The pandemic caused many difficulties for a lot of people – some were serious, while others were minor inconveniences. Although certainly closer to the latter than the former, one such struggle for historians was the amount that it limited our research. Much like everything else in the country, archives were closed to the public, so unless you knew an archivist who was willing to go above and beyond, you were sometimes stuck with what research you already had. (I once heard someone refer to late-2020 to mid-2021 as “the year of the literature review.”)

Fortunately for many of us, however, we soon learned that several places on the Internet hosted those all-important primary sources – and those digital repositories were only growing. In this brief post, I wanted to highlight a few locations that host Canadian Baptist records.

New Brunswick Historical Newspapers Project

Spearheaded by the University of New Brunswick, the New Brunswick Historical Newspapers Project is an initiative to catalogue all periodicals across the province, with plans to digitize a number of their holdings. One such newspaper is The Christian Visitor, the weekly organ of the Regular Baptists in New Brunswick (in 1885, it merged with its Nova Scotia counterpart, The Christian Messenger, to form The Messenger and Visitor). Fortunately for researchers, the entire run (1847 to 1884) of The Christian Visitor is available online in a searchable format.

Canadiana

The year before the pandemic, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) began providing free access to their online digital database, Canadiana. Within this repository is a wealth of material on Baptists in Canada, including the yearbooks for Baptists across the country, minutes from association meetings, and histories of various churches. Moreover, it also includes several notable newspapers, such as The Canada Baptist Magazine and Missionary Register (1837–1841), the Toronto Christian Observer (1853), and the above-mentioned Messenger and Visitor (1885–1905).

Acadia University Digital Collection

Another repository is the Acadia University Digital Collection. Formed by Baptists in 1838, Acadia has long been an important part of Baptist life in the Atlantic Provinces. Among those resources that are most relevant here are the annual yearbooks, including the Minutes of the African Baptist Association (later African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia) (1855–1987) and Baptist Year Books of the Maritimes (1846–1922), and newspapers, such as Baptist Missionary Magazine of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (1827–1836). This collection also includes personal materials from notable Baptist people and families, including revivalist Edward Manning and missionary Silas T. Rand.

Final Thoughts

These are just a few notable highlights of what is available in digital format. These repositories can provide scholars and students alike with important and insightful resources. As the online databases grow, I hope it encourages further historical research. There are many topics in Canadian Baptist history just waiting to be discovered; all we need are the people to do the digging – and these databases have provided us with a wonderful place to start.

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Taylor Murray, PhD, is Instructor of Christian History and Creative Producer of Distributed Learning at Tyndale University in Toronto. He is a Member at Large with the Canadian Baptist Historical Society.

 

**The views of this Blog represent those of the author, and not necessarily the CBHS.**