Elgin County’s first Woman’s Institute branch was formed in Aylmer in 1902. Elgin’s Institute branches have had a deep, positive effect on their respective communities. Under the motto “Home and Country” members engaged in efforts such as knitting hundreds of pairs of socks for local First World War soldiers, making tons of preserves for British and European families in both World Wars and leading the drive towards pasteurized milk in Ontario. They contributed to scholarships and held fundraisers for the local hospitals and the Elgin County Museum. Women came together under the banner of the Federated Women’s Institutes and worked tirelessly to make life better for their families, their neighbours and the world beyond.

In the mid 1930s Lady Tweedsmuir, wife of the Governor General began encouraging Women’s Institute branches to preserve the history of their communities in response to what she saw as a rapidly changing and urbanizing landscape. By 1947, local branches across the province were compiling living “scrapbooks” which came to be known as Tweedsmuir Histories. In many ways, the members of the Women’s Institutes were the unofficial archivists of their communities. They acquired records, oral histories, photographs and much more for inclusion in their volumes, leaving us today with an outstanding resource on the history of rural Ontario.

Through this project, the Elgin County Archives is able to bring Elgin County’s Tweedsmuir Histories into the digital age. We encourage you to explore their fascinating contents and we hope you gain further insights into Elgin’s rich historical and Agricultural heritage.

When the project began, there were 27 Tweedsmuir History volumes containing approximately 5000 pages on hand at the Elgin County Archives. As word spread about the project, this number grew to 50 volumes with over 7000 pages. The volumes were disassembled to allow each page to be individually scanned without distortion. The pages were almost all scanned as jpeg images as this yielded a high quality image with a smaller file size. As the books were being scanned, we took the opportunity to do assessments of their condition, with an eye towards prioritizing future conservation efforts. We carried out minor repairs such as replacing metal fasteners with archival clips, storing fragile items in archival folders and removing surface dirt. The volumes are all stored in document boxes at the Archives’ temperature and humidity controlled storage facility.

The scanned pages were processed in Adobe Photoshop 7 to enhance photographs and to re-align pages and their content for easier viewing on the web site. In many cases, several photos had been mounted on single pages in a volume and so copies of smaller photos deemed to be of interest, have been placed on a separate page to make viewing easier.

With so much material to accommodate, all measures to save space were used. In some cases, a page that contained a very short passage of text at the end of an article was added to the previous page. In other cases, where there was a large blank area between an image and accompanying text, that space has been removed. As most of the volumes lead off with standard material on Mrs. Hoodless, Lord and Lady Tweedsmuir, the Mary Stewart Collect, etc, we have included only one version of these items. Otherwise, a search for Lady Tweedsmuir, for instance, would yield 50 copies of the same information. There are a number of larger pamphlets found in the books, which have had only sample pages included here. These items may be viewed at the Archives.

Because of the process described above, the page numbers found in the volumes no longer correspond exactly to the material as it appears on the site. We have removed these page numbers from the scanned images to avoid confusion. The material on the web site is still in the order found in the books. The indexes found in most volumes can still be used as a guide to the approximate location of the material.