A Canadian Family

Genealogy, Family History & Vintage Postcards

Methodist Centenary Church | Montreal

The Methodist Centenary Church – home church of the Harveys in the early twentieth century – served the rapidly expanding, working-class district of The Point – officially known as Point St. Charles. This is the church where Marmaduke Lawrence Harvey was baptised. Unfortunately  the building was destroyed on Christmas Day in 1911.

Text that accompanied photo:

Montreal’s Spectacular Christmas Day Fire – The exterior of the West End Methodist Church as it looked after the disastrous Christmas Day fire had been extinguished by Montreal’s heroic fire laddies, man of whom were severely frost-bitten while fighting the flames. (Photo by J.F. Cook).

Click on the image to your left and you can go see a larger version of this – and many other images – of Montreal from the Massicotte Collection. Edouard-Zotique Massicotte was a very interesting gentleman who collected images of Montreal buildings – including newspaper clippings, postcards and photographs – over a fifty year period form 1870 to 1920. What is really fascinating is that he placed these into albums which were organized street by street. What a great resource today for local historians!

January 2, 2010 Posted by | . | , | Leave a Comment

You’re In The Army Now! Marmaduke Lawrence Harvey In The Canadian Expeditionary Force

Dear Gabrielle,

As I promised you the other day I’m continuing to post material that relates to your great-grandfather’s brother Marmaduke Lawrence Harvey. I know he’s of particular interest to you because you and your Grandpa Harvey share the same middle name as Marmaduke. What a great Harvey family tradition!

Yesterday I published your wonderful photograph from the Harvey Family Archives which shows Marmaduke in his military Uniform. Today I’m showing you something I found last summer - your great-uncle’s enlistment papers which I obtained from the Soldiers of the First World War Database . Military enlistment papers are a terrific resource for family historians because they contain all sorts of information like the person’s home address and religion, but also information that you don’t usually find anywhere else such as height and hair colour – which are pretty hard to tell from black and white photographs!

One last note - you may be asking yourself why I’ve bothered to transcribe some of the information when we can read it so clearly on the enlistment form. The reason is that search engines cannot read images. So if we want  fellow researchers to find us, we need to have text that the “search bots” can read.

Bye for now,

Auntie Evelyn

Information from Marmaduke Lawrence Harvey’s Enlistment Papers

Marmaduke lived at 176 Congregation St. In Montreal, Quebec.  He belonged to the Methodist Church (probably Read more »

January 2, 2010 Posted by | . | , , , | 1 Comment

   

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