Heritage Inventory: n/a
Heritage Designation: n/a
Why Endangered:  Lack of awareness.  Neglect/poor funding.

Buildings might be built of wood and mortar, or might survive a flood or fire – or they might not.  Documents are even more vulnerable to disaster and, unlike buildings, can be easily lost. Earlier this year, I bumped into a student hired by the city to clean through old boxes of documents, and I happened to notice the obvious age of some bound volumes.  To my amazement, there next to the pipes in the basement storage rooms were the some of the old assessment rolls of the city – lists of people who paid taxes on their property, considered gold mines of information by historians, and even more so by genealogists.

New Westminster has an excellent collection of local documented history in its various museums, archives and library.  But many of these documents are not inventoried or catalogued, or are otherwise out of reach to the public.  The city simply has no complete record of what is available in the form of local historical documents.

Many of the old documents in the possession of the city are in other languages, such as those of the old Chinese Benevolent Association, which have never been translated.  Other records are out of reach – acquired by private collectors, or taken in by distant libraries and archives at a time when local historical documents were not quite so prized – the library of the University of California at Berkeley has one of the best collections of early BC history to be found.  Some religious archives with important early records about New Westminster are closed to the public.

Some records are available in theory but out of reach in practical terms – historians often forego land title research, for example, because of the expense involved in accessing the records, and the extremely limited access (only licensed companies, not other researchers, can access land title documents, for a fee).  Land records can reveal important historic information about a house, a hospital, a neighborhood, or a city – but only if such records are truly accessible for historic research purposes. Sadly, there is a national problem. 

In a report earlier this year, federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser stated that Canada’s heritage sites are crumbling, and that many historic documents are rotting in substandard buildings.  Fraser called on the government to move quickly to halt the loss of history across the country. In order to ensure that the value of historical documents can be fully appreciated, and that the public has full access, the city needs to develop a plan to translate documents not available in English, develop a complete inventory of all historical documents in the possession of the city and its agencies, improve the budget for conservation where needed, to look in the nooks and crannies for other valuable historic documents which might be tucked away, and microfilm and place on line key documents.