Recently museum board member Tristan Strathy flagged for us that a Canadian book seller had recently sold three Queen’s Own Rifles Regimental Order Books. These three books would fill the final gaps in our 19th century collections of orders:

• 1860 to 1865
• 1866 to 1867
• 1881 to 1886

We quickly identified the purchaser as the Brock University Archives and Special Collections. After reaching out to the Brock Archivist David Sharron, he very kindly agreed to allow us to digitize these items in their digitization lab using their equipment.

Deputy Curator Shaun Kelly spent a day at the Brock Archive figuring out how to use their equipment and taking all the required images. In the following days Brock shared the images with us and Shaun then undertook cropping over 200 images because two of the volumes had been stitched together. With that completed I was able to take the images for each volume and create a pdf file and add relevant bookmarks to make them easier to use for research purposes.

With the final documents completed, we uploaded them to our museum website’s Archives page where they are included with other volumes from our collection that we had already digitized. And finally, we sent copies of the finalized pdf documents back to Brock University so they can add them to their own online collection of digitized documents.

These three volumes of regimental orders (along with those in our collection) are filled with both the mundane and the fascinating records of the regiment’s life – lists those taken on strength and those struck off strength; promotions and weekly duty personnel lists; announcements of special parades or range exercises; and a whole variety of other information.

One particular piece of historical trivia, involved the notice that, as of 19 October 1864, the Battalion drills would now be held on Wednesday evenings instead of Tuesdays. Serving and former members of the regiment will appreciate that after doing so in various drill halls and armouries for over 157 years, the regiment still trains on Wednesday evenings!