City of Vancouver Archives: Major Matthews’ Early Vancouver

Early Vancouver is full of photographs and sketches in which Major Matthews provided keys to buildings or people. You’ll see numbers or letters written or typed on the image with a key placed on or below it, sometimes written in very small script!

Major Matthews did not limit himself to just photographs, maps and sketches. He included whatever interested him about the history of Vancouver and the region. The following are typical examples.

In its 3,300 pages, Early Vancouver holds a wealth of textual and visual information about Vancouver’s past. Like all collections of pioneers’ stories, it has its limitations. The distance of 30 or 40 years tends to fade the storyteller’s memory and embellishment of certain events and selective retention of others does occur. Archivists put great stock in the original record, the primary source: correspondence, diaries, and other contemporary records. Works like Early Vancouver, however, serve researchers extremely well in giving them a place to start. As the late Fred Thirkell says in his introduction to the Friends of the Vancouver City Archives’ 1998 amalgamated index to Early Vancouver, Matthews’ work provides a source of valuable leads, a way to substantiate information in other sources, and a means to flesh out or humanize other barebones factual accounts. And sometimes, it provides the only known account of an event there is.