Welcome!

This year I have been doing a research project into the branch of my great-grandfather's extended family from Canada that settled in the Bronx around the year 1900, which is now being expanded into this digital collection. I have been able to collect hundreds of pages of source documents, historical records, deeds, travel documents, and more which I will be collating here. There is a rich trove of data due to the fact that much of the generation that came of age in New York City following WWI included international lawyers, travelers, and members of New York society due to the wealth and influence of their extended family in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I wanted to compile this digital collection here for two reasons:

First, I had initially begun documenting much of their lives on Ancestry.com, but realized the scope of that project has far outpaced what Ancestry is capable of, the site's interface was limiting my ability to tell a richer story, and I did not want to trap my research in a walled garden. For example, I can recreate a great deal of their social network from personal letters, business associates, and personal references, as most of these individuals are also well documented historically, but Ancestry does not have any mechanism for documenting non-family associates.

Second, I've become interested in archival studies and library science more broadly, and I am picking back up my Classical Studies degree in the fall, so I wanted to do a proof-of-concept archivial and exhibition project using Omeka to gain some more formalized archival and research experience.

This site will be a repository of stories, historical artifacts, documents, and more, covering the 1880s to 1950 in Halifax and New York City, as well as stops in Berlin, Paris, and London.

I've named this project 133 West 188th street after their primary residence in New York City which belonged to various family members and their decendents for over 80 years, often housed half a dozen or more relatives at a time depending on the decade, and can be reliably counted upon for verifying the validity of ambiguous documents, as regardless of where people traveled or temporarily relocated, "133 West 188th" is sure to show up eventually in a forwarding address or immigration record.