McKenzie fonds

I had a chance on Friday to look through some of the more interesting pieces listed in the finding aids and found a whole bunch of useful stuff about the Craigflower farm, including

• A list of those accompanying the McKenzie's from Scotland to the Craigflower farm, with occupations and family members
• Daily labour books, like time-sheets, listing what each individual on the farm did each day; spans at least a few years and different seasons -> Names include many of those from the first list, probably that of Melrose too, which could be interesting
• At least 3-4 employee agreements with the PSAC/HBC - I showed these to Taryn - and we agreed that this is the sort of thing we might want to put a copy of on the site; I didn't have a chance to do a thorough examination of the documents, but they seem to be something like indenture agreements, with addendum written as agreements between McKenzie and the individual employee
• An illustration and part of a manual for the first steam powered thresher acquired by the farm, but I'll have to double check the year
• And countless inventories of farm equipment and stores, promissory notes, contracts with the Royal Navy, other accounting documents, etc - Many of these are difficult to read, and questionable in their usefulness, but the numbers might prove useful to flesh out details
• a rather interesting ration book stating how much of each food item (pork, tea, sugar, beans, tobacco, etc) was allowed to each family (McKenzie, Lidgate, etc) at different time

The collection is impressive and at times unreadable, but I think these things alone will give us a great insight into the workings of the farm and the activities of the workers: we know their names, their wages, what they did, what they got to eat, in some cases where they lived with photos of their houses.

It looks very microhistorical. Awesome.

-Dan