Yesterday I went to the Saint-Boniface archives. Covid protocoles make for socially-distanced desks, and yesterday my desk for reviewing documents was just outside, under the arches of a preserved wall from the Empire Hotel.
Behind me was a wooden desk, also from the Empire Hotel.
Covid protocols keep me masked. Documents are all safe from my exhalations.
Some documents are huge!
This is a land title document with an impressively huge red wax seal, covered for its protection, still bearing pretty green ribbons. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is mentioned. It is dated 1888. Not all documents are so big and land titles eventually shrunk. But I like to imagine the office where this was written, the officious people who dipped their fountain pen in an inkwell, the giant seal and the man to whom the land was granted, walking out with this massive paper, to go farm a plot in relative isolation, going to bed at night in a rudimentary wood log house.