British Columbia from the Earliest Times to the Present, Biographical - Vol.4

Cat No.:   CA0361-4:

Published in the same year that the Great War broke out - 1914 - this self contained volume IV of the four volume set does its part in telling the history of British Columbia by relating the life stories of about 710 of its prominent citizens. It accomplishes this in the form of individual biographies, many (about 200) of which are accompanied by professionally photographed studio portraits of the subjects. Each biography has been submitted by its subject - or by his family and / or close acquaintances - so there is no real common structure to them but, in general, they provide a familial and working history of the subject's life. In this process his spouse(s), his children, his parents and any siblings are introduced, at least by, name and often by genealogical and national origin. The amount of this content varies from a single paragraph to one of several pages.

This is a thick book, numbering to 1205 pages. Every fifth (or so) printed page is given to a single large portrait of one of the subjects, and the backs of these portrait sheets (which are also numbered) are blank so the number of text pages is about 803. This makes the length of the average Bio. about 1 1/8 of a page.

Or, to put it another way, all the Bios. provide good basic information and most contain a wealth of detail about the subject and his family. Amongst the 700 odd subjects are many who were attracted to British Columbia from other parts of Canada by stories of fortunes to be made by exploiting the abundant natural, and renewable, resources including agriculture and forestry, but most notably by the stories of gold. Many of the biographies contain anecdotes of desperate survival while experiencing the hardships of the back country in search of a fortune. Other settlers came with the train construction crews as the link between east and west was forged, and still more followed as a result of this improved means of transportation to grow produce and to manufacture goods.

We have placed a sampler of some selected pages from both Vol. 3 and 4 of the book - including the whole of both Indices of Subjects - on our Downloads page so you can see what the book's content looks like and can see if any of your families might be included. The four volumes of this complete work are available as four individual CDs, or in two single CDs giving the Biographies (Vol. 3 & 4) and the Complete History (Vol. 1 & 2) or as a complete set comprising all four volumes.

We invite you to join in our thanks to the Slocan Community Library, BC and particularly to Joyce, their librarian and a great friend of Archive CD Books Canada, for allowing us to borrow this wonderful book so we could make the digital edition available to the wider Genealogy community.  We will be donating copies of the CD to the library so further wear and tear on this great old book can be avoided

No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-897405-87-1 ;