The MacDonald Family Letters, 1779-1801 is a digital collection hosted by the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives. The ACVA is a joint initiative of Margaret Conrad, Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies, and the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton.
Roger Gillis, a native of Prince Edward Island, initiated this project as part of his thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for a Master of Arts degree in History and Humanities Computing at the University of New Brunswick in 2007. He worked with the ACVA team to develop this website.
We welcome your feedback about this collection and others featured in the ACVA. Please contact us with your comments or suggestions.
Interested in digital imaging, document transcription, or markup techniques for archival documents? Read about digitizing archival documents for online presentation.
Spanning several generations of the MacDonald family, the MacDonald Family Collection consists of letters, leases, invoices, and accounts and spans the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
The MacDonald letters have passed down through the family. In the nineteenth century they were held by Mary Elizabeth MacDonald, the sister-in-law of Archibald MacDonald, a father of Confederation. The MacDonald letters currently are in the possession of Mary J. Gallant, a resident of Prince Edward Island. Those involved in the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives initiative are grateful to Mary J. Gallant for her permission to image and to transcribe the documents available on this website.
Although most of the original documents relating to the MacDonald family are in private hands, photocopies of the letters are now housed in the Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records Office in Charlottetown.
The ACVA project team meets weekly to discuss and to manage the research, editing, imaging, transcription, encoding, and web development tasks relating to our projects. In addition to our immediate team, our external advisory committee provides invaluable scholarly advice on the content of our websites.
Particular acknowledgement is due to Roger Gillis for providing the foundation of this project through his 2007 UNB Masters thesis, "The Life and Letters of Prince Edward Island Proprietor Captain John MacDonald of Glenaladale: An Exercise in Humanities Computing."
We owe special thanks to Mary J. Gallant for permission to scan and digitize the ten original MacDonald letters available on this site. We would also like to thank Myrna Babineau, Mary J. Gallant, and Ryan O'Connor for their transcriptions of the ten featured letters.
We extend special thanks to Dr. Rusty Bittermann, Department of History at St. Thomas University, for reviewing the site and lending his academic expertise.
We are also grateful for the cooperation of the following organizations:
Texts and images in the collection are available for research purposes only. The Canada Research Chair and the Electronic Text Centre require clear and proper citation on all referenced materials. We encourage links to the site but under no conditions are the texts or images to be copied to or posted on other servers.
Commercial use of these texts is prohibited without written agreement from the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives.
A number of the texts available on this site have complex rights associated with them and for this reason we ask that you contact us for permission of use.
We encourage links to this website provided that any such link does not suggest an endorsement by or affiliation with the ACVA or its sponsoring organizations. Sites should link to the collection's splash page at http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca/acva/macdonald/
This collection links to external websites that complement the material presented in the collection; however, the ACVA is not responsible for the contents of linked websites, or any changes or updates to such websites. Linked sites undergo periodic review.
To request a link from this collection to your website, please contact us.
It is our policy to monitor changes made to Wikipedia entries linked to our sites. While we are not responsible for the entries' content, we do assume responsibility for reviewing alterations that might compromise the value of the linked pages as information resources for visitors to this website.