The tradition or art of scrapbooking emerges from an inherent desire for individuals to leave a legacy. Tangible, but highly visual in nature, a scrapbook is a careful curation of images, clippings, and other ephemera that tells a story of someone’s life at a particular moment in time. Unlike a diary or journal, which are much more intimate and introspective, a scrapbook can be personal, but there is also a performative element of display, or presentation in the way each page is organized. Scrapbooks are curated with an audience in mind.
Museum at Home: Bedroom Archaeology Part II – Catalogue Your Findings
Museum at Home is a weekly blog series offering fun and educational hands-on activities for children to do at home […]
Guided Spirit Walks 2019 Behind-the-Scenes: RESEARCH
Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at our research and writing process, rehearsals, costumes, and much more for this year’s Guided Spirit Walks, with some sneak peeks of what is coming in September!
Yearbook Flip: Nursing a Voice to Lead
Nurses Week, and International Nurses Day (May 12), celebrates the roles nurses play in saving lives and improving the health […]
Yearbook Flip: Girls Athletics
In reflecting on International Women’s Day last month, and the theme of #BalanceforBetter, I wanted to explore how female teenagers were represented in the sports pages of St. Catharines High School yearbooks. Due to traditional ideas of gender roles, athletics in North America have a long history of being male-centered and male-dominated. How did students work to address this imbalance in St. Catharines high schools in the twentieth century?
Objects Legacies: Leg Shackles
Museum Collections vaults are naturally very curious and intriguing places. You could spend hours wandering through our vaults, examining the […]
Object Legacies: Slave Memoir
arefully wrapped in acid-free paper and stored inconspicuously among other artifacts of its kind, is an 1856 edition copy of Solomon Northup’s memoir, 12 Years A Slave. It is part of the Museum’s Rare Book Collection. Materially, this artifact is catalogued with the following description…
Yearbook Flip: High School History Lesson
The St. Catharines Museum currently has 259 yearbooks catalogued in its archival collection. The yearbooks span the years 1913 to […]
Museum Chat Live! E309 – We Did Our Bit: Closing our WWI Exhibit
Our very popular WWI exhibition, Doing Our Bit: St. Catharines to the Western Front is officially closing its doors at […]
We Did Our Bit: WWI Exhibition Favourites Part 6 – Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary Stories
This is the sixth and final installment of the We Did Our Bit WWI exhibit-closing series. This post was contributed by […]
We Did Our Bit: WWI Exhibition Favourites Part 5 – Olive Weller’s Travel Diary
This is the fifth installment of the We Did Our Bit WWI exhibit-closing series. This post was contributed by Adrian […]
We Did Our Bit: WWI Exhibition Favourites Part 4 – Local Impact
This is the fourth installment of the We Did Our Bit WWI exhibit-closing series. Click to read the earlier posts in […]
We Did Our Bit: WWI Exhibition Favourites Part 3 – Bessie Beyer’s Uniform
This is the third installment of the We Did Our Bit series. Click to read earlier posts in the series here. This post […]
We Did Our Bit: WWI Exhibition Favourites Part 1 – “Pip, Squeak and Wilfred”
After four great years, the St. Catharines Museum’s Doing Our Bit: WWI from St. Catharines to the Western Front exhibition […]
BHM Part 3: What Can We Learn From a Toy Doll?
The St. Catharines Museum recently catalogued an artifact that offers a unique perspective to Black History and the legacy of […]
aMUSE is popping up at Rodman Hall!
The role of gender in advertising has been an issue in society since the advent of modern media and advertising methods. Over the years media sources have used methods that concentrate on sex and stereotypical images and ideas of the parts men and women play as consumers. Such methods have constructed a paradigm of how we view females and the roles they play in society, the most prominent being the housewife which began in the early 1950s.
Fire Insurance Plans Print Series
The plans continue to remain an important resource in my work as a public historian at the Museum today. I often find myself considering research questions by first checking the city’s business directories spanning the last 150 years, and the fire insurance plans. They aren’t perfect – they are static and only cover certain geography – but the visuals are priceless.
And that’s why we just couldn’t keep these plans to ourselves.
#MuseumLife: Testing Artifacts for Hazardous Materials
If you are a thrill seeker, or like to live life dangerously, maybe you should consider museum work. Caring for […]
#VintageSTCM: 50 Years of the St. Catharines Museum
The Museum’s vision and mission are a bit different than it was 50 years ago. Our community’s identity, how we study and present history, and the nature of museum-going have changed drastically over the last 50 years. And the Museum has changed with it. We now focus on an inclusive narrative for all those who live in our diverse city. The exhibit serves as a reminder of where we have come from and where we hope to go.
A Day in Collections: Cleaning the Fire Pumper
Snowflake & Sven’s Adventures with the Museum Collection Continue You know the steam fire pumper on display in the St. […]
A Day in Collections – Archives
These past few weeks have been very busy for Snowflake and Sven, with the First Fridays Ugly Christmas Sweater Party […]
A Day in Collections – St. Catharines Standard Photographs
This week, Snowflake and Sven travel through a vibrant visual history of St. Catharines with a sneak peak of the […]
A Day in Collections – Artifacts
This week, Snowflake and Sven visit Tanya, the St. Catharines Museum’s Collection Technician – Artifacts. Tanya takes care of the […]
A Day in Collections – Digital
Snowflake and Sven Take On The St. Catharines Museum If you follow us on Twitter, you may have heard that […]
aMUSE: Lost Architecture
The Last aMUSE of 2016 Our final aMUSE pop-up exhibition of 2016 focused on the lost and remaining 19th century […]
Caption This! Contest Wrap-up and Winner Announcement
Throughout the month of September, we’ve been inviting the public to help us co-curate our Caption This! Social Media series. […]
Special Announcement: “Caption This!” Contest
We’re recruiting our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram audiences to be our co-curators! For the month of September, help us caption […]
Inspiring Hockey History
Our awesome Niagara Ice Dogs (we’re super proud) Ontario Hockey League team went all the way to the OHL Memorial […]
Open Late: A Summer of Museum Fun
We are so excited to announce the line up for the 2016 Open Late series. Open Late Why stay open […]
St. Catharines Museum + In the Soil Festival
The St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre is happy to be a participant in this year’s In the Soil […]
Votes for Women!
March 1 marks the official opening of a new exhibition of photographs at the St. Catharines Museum: “Leading the Way: […]
“Ask Alicia” – Merritton High School
This week’s “Ask Alicia” will take us to Merritt Street in the mid 1930’s when Merritton High School was built. […]
Know Your Neighbours Special Edition Pt. 8 – Lt. Col. William Hamilton Merritt IV, M.D.
Lt. Col. William Hamilton Merritt (IV), M.D. (1865-1924) Lt. Col. William Hamilton Merritt, M.D., a native of St. Catharines, […]
Know Your Neighbours Special Edition Pt 7 – Catharine (Cassie) Welland Merritt Pellatt
Catharine (Cassie) Welland Merritt was born in 1866, the oldest daughter of Jedediah Prendergast Merritt and Emily Alexandrina Prescott Merritt. […]