Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings

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Alice had three older brothers: James, Frederick and Francis (Frank). Frank joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force on March 23rd, 1916 in Belleville and it may have been this event which triggered Alice’s interest in the war. Frank’s service record is available from Library and Archives Canada.

The scrapbook mainly comprises cuttings from The Daily Intelligencer newspaper during the war, where Alice carefully recorded references to Belleville boys overseas, sometimes annotating the clippings with her own observations about whether a man had returned from the front, or which school he had attended.

Alongside the newspaper extracts are other more phone number library personal items, such as postcards, theatre programs, calling cards, invitations and ticket stubs. This page illustrates some of the variety:


Here we find an invitation, two pressed flowers “from ruins of a French village, May 1917” and a picture “off a box of chocolates Jim gave me for my birthday, 1916.”

Alice did not begin with blank pages: she used a copy of Richardson’s New Method for the Piano-Forte, originally published in 1859 by Nathan Richardson. In between Alice’s pastings, we can see parts of the text of the underlying book. Some of the pages still had visible page numbers, although most did not, but the majority had at least some legible words and phrases. This was the key to re-creating Alice’s original order.

We discovered that the Richardson book had been digitized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was available online through the Internet Archive.