Editor’s note: For the past number of years, the NTCI Foundation’s archivist, Nancy Baines, has been working on a labour of love – the cataloguing and digitizing of the University Scholarship Winners’ photographs. In the following article, Nancy shares this journey.

If you attended NT any time prior to the 1990s, you will probably remember the rows of scholarship photos that lined the main wall of the foyer. Discretely framed, with five faces to a frame, these photos of former NT university scholarship winners, displayed our bragging rights to academic excellence from 1919 to 1986 when this practice was discontinued. Sometime in the 1990s, these photos were taken down and carelessly stored anywhere that space could be found for them. Some were piled in the back of the auditorium under the stairs, others in the former “kitchen-cum- archives room” in the basement and still others were placed in the boiler room and caretakers’ room. There they languished until it was decided to build the new school. 

When I took over the care of the archives, I did not realize that the photos were so unloved. But eventually, realizing that something had to be done to preserve them, I appealed to the TDSB’s conservationist for advice on how to take better care of them. Needless to say, 348 framed photographs took up too much space to properly store them in their frames. So, several months before the big move, I had the caretakers comb the school to locate all the photos. Then I removed them from their frames, carefully noting the information about them. Fortunately, I also had a typed list that a former secretary had kept of the winners. After destroying the frames, I got some pleasure in smashing the glass to little pieces, wrapping it and putting the whole mess out for the garbage. But no more could be done until well after the move. Then I took on the chore of scanning the photos and placing the pictures themselves into binders, recording each name and scholarships won. All this has been done to the best of my ability and now four large binders are available for anyone who would like to see them. We also have a USB key with the scanned photos.

However, much to my dismay, some of the framed photos never resurfaced when we went looking for them in 2010.  The following photos / scholarship information are missing:

• 1964:   Susan Lederman, Douglas Long, Warren Milne, Glen Patterson, Peteris Zvilna
• 1965:   Francis Aboud, Jacqueline Constam, Georg Gunther, Lorraine Koffman, Sheldon Larry
• 1969:   Wendy Wayling  (although listed as having no photograph) 
• 1971:   Paul Eprille, Ingid Jarvis, Jan Shapiro, Dianne Short, Martin Snelgrove, Marilyn Thomson
• 1981:   Peter Chan, Helen Ferrigan, Stephen Ko, Christopher McLeod, Paul Quinn
• 1982:   Michael Armstrong, Peter Wan
• 1983:   Jill MacDonald

I have scanned and enlarged the yearbook photos for the students listed above. They are fuzzy but better than nothing. If anyone has information about the scholarships these alumni won and/or a copy of their scholarship photos, I would appreciate hearing from you. Please contact me at: ntcifoundation@ntci.on.ca.