YMCA records are an academic goldmine

While The Journal was interviewing Marrelli, Bruce Henry was quietly working on a laptop nearby. Hired on contract, originally with the help of philanthropic foundations and later with other external grant funding, he is arranging and describing the contents of 400 cardboard boxes of records from the Montreal YMCA.

The Montreal branch was the first Y in North America, and it was pivotal in the social history of 19th- and early 20th-century English-speaking Montreal (not to mention that its evening educational program in 1926 became Sir George Williams University). How the YMCA evolved from a male, evangelical Protestant organization into the bilingual, secular, widely inclusive one it is today would make a great PhD thesis, Henry said.

The Y was run from the beginning by volunteers who were community leaders — “very smart men.” They didn’t start a new branch without what we would now call a business plan, and their exhaustive reports are pure gold for the social historian. Leafing through a 1925 survey that even lists the bowling alleys in Montreal, Henry said “there’s not a spelling mistake in the whole thing.”

Developing and preserving this kind of material cements Concordia’s linkage with its home, English-speaking Montreal, and it is part of the Archives’ mandate as an academic resource for the university.