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Historical Council Minutes

Council minutes are often the best starting place for historical research into municipal decisions, events or laws.  The Municipal Archives has digitized all pre-amalgamation (1996) council minutes. Start your search by clicking on a municipality; you will get more precise results searching first in the indexes:

Council Reports or Submissions

Before every meeting of Council the Clerk provided councillors and aldermen with documentation submitted by staff or others that was relevant to the agenda.   These reports, petitions, correspondence, plans, etc. are often needed to fully understand the issue discussed and are available at the Municipal Archives. As you consult a Council minute it may mention a particular report or document.

  1. Note the date of the meeting, and the agenda item
  2. Contact the Archives to request the report or submission; copies of specific submissions can be requested.

Award-winning project

Halifax's Council Minute Digitizaton Project was awarded the Council of Nova Scotia Archives' 2015 Dr. Phyllis P. Blakely Award for outstanding accomplishment in archival work. The three-year project involved scanning each page of the original minute-books, or the microfilm of minutes, when its quality was adequate. Those images were then indexed into pdf files and run through optimal character recognition software to render the text keyword searchable. The earliest minutes are hand-written and the OCR software does not recognize the beautiful cursive writing. For those years the Archives is transcribing the indexes that the Clerk's Office of the time created, to enable at least that level of on-line searchability.

Thanks to Global News for permission to use their image

 

GlobalNews

Halifax Municipal Archives is very appreciative of project funding provided though the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage's Provincial Archival Development Program.

Over 250 years of municipal council meeting minutes have been digitized and are now available at your fingertips. This incredible wealth of documentation of the decisions, events, developments, and actors - citizens and councillors, who have shaped our region can now be searched and viewed on-line. Read the original Council discussions from each of our former municipalities. Discover the details and occasional dramas that unfolded in each council chamber.

View the Global TV News story about the Council Minutes Digitization Project