Happy birthday, Sherbrooke Record!

By Jazmine Aldrich

A little birdy told me that our friendly local English daily celebrates its 129^th birthday, this month, so I am joining in the festivities with a peek at their history through their archives!

Did you know that the Eastern Townships Resource Centre (ETRC) holds the archives of the Sherbrooke Record? The archives were first loaned to us in 1980, and formally donated in 1997 on the occasion of a second donation. Perhaps their one-hundredth anniversary in 1997 felt like the right occasion to commit their legacy – so far – to the safekeeping of an archive, or perhaps they felt a premonition of disaster to come.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 2, 1998, the building, presses, and equipment belonging to The Record were destroyed in a devastating fire, along with many of their archives not yet deposited with the ETRC. Not accepting defeat, however, The Record was back to publishing by the following Wednesday out of temporary offices borrowed from the Eastern Townships School Board.

The archives in The Record fonds (P101) at the ETRC do not include copies of the newspaper, itself; being a publication, The Record is preserved by Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and back issues can be consulted for free using the digital platform called BAnQ Numérique. Many of the ETRC’s other archival fonds and collections include clippings from the newspaper relating to the subjects of those fonds and collections.

Rather than keeping copies of the newspaper, The Record fonds contains documentation relating to the management of the business, including carriers’ route lists, circulation records, press room production reports, and more. The archival fonds also contains over one thousand photographs, and that number is growing rapidly.

Since early 2025, the ETRC has been collaborating with the Sherbrooke Record to gradually acquire its photographic archives, which number in the tens of thousands of photographs. Four Bishop’s University students completing internships with the ETRC have had the opportunity to sort through some of the photograph subject files, deciding which photographs will be kept and which will be returned to The Record. The interns then scan the photographs that are retained for our archives so that The Record can have digital copies for future use. Each file that is kept is described and labelled for easy retrieval and the photographs are rehoused into archival-grade plastic sleeves for long-term storage. We at the ETRC are proud of this collaboration between our organization, the newspaper, and Bishop’s University’s History department. Looking ahead, I hope that we will continue to mark these important milestones in the Sherbrooke Record’s story – documenting it all through their archives. If you are interested in consulting the archives of The Record or any other archives in our holdings, please contact the ETRC Archives.