Canada, the Missing Years: The Lost Images of Our Heritage, 1895-1924

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

By one of those strange quirks of fate too farfetched to be credible in a work of fiction, 4,000 lost items of early Canadian photography have been re-discovered in the British Library in London and have been carefully and laboriously identified and catalogued.

Between the years 1895 and 1924 the Canadian Government was compelled to send one copy of all materials deposited at Ottawa to register copyright to the Library of the British Museum, now the British Library, in London. Two sets remained in Canada, one in the Library of Parliament, the other at the Copyright Office. As luck would have it, both Canadian sets were lost — one in the fires that destroyed part of the Library of Parliament, the other, at the Copyright Office, thrown away by order of the Cabinet in 1938, an astonishing piece of vandalism. Then, in 1979, largely through the work of Dr. Patrick O’Neill, the vast deposit of Canadian material, largely un-catalogued, was rediscovered in the British Library.

Now the long-lost photos are treasured and reprinted: pictures of Canada’s Native peoples in ceremonial and everyday garb, unspoiled vistas of scarcely travelled wilderness, farmers, politicians, social events, and disasters. The pictures are the more precious for being so nearly lost forever. Accompanied by the complete story of the collection and its almost-miraculous survival, each picture is captioned, and the collection is indexed by photographer and by subject.