Back to Search
The L.R. Wilson Heritage Research Archives staff is proud to present for Archives Awareness Week our new online exhibit, “Port Colborne High School Yearbooks: The Tattler.” When the high school was celebrating its centennial in 2023, we received a request to make its yearbooks accessible online.
To bring this project to fruition, over 70 yearbooks had to be scanned page by page at a high resolution, and then had to be uploaded to the Our Ontario website. The Port Colborne Historical and
%20(1).png "PCHMM 985.27.1 (The Tattler 1922 Cover)")
Marine Museum has many of these publications in its collection, while others were borrowed from the Port Colborne High School Library to fill in some of the gaps. This project has taken over two years to complete, with multiple staff involved.
In September, 1921, the school first opened its doors to students in grades 9, 10, and 11, but did not receive official high school status until 1923, when grades 12 and 13 were added. The first edition of the yearbook was published in December, 1922. In its early years, the Tattler resembled an annual school newspaper. As its name suggests, the early editions of the Tattler had a gossipy feel, with tongue-in-cheek quips, jokes, and clever rhymes about individual students’ personalities or proclivities.
Yearbooks were not published every year, especially in the school’s early decades, and yearbooks in these early years looked quite different from how they do now. For example, the early yearbooks have very few photographs, and class photos were not included until 1946.
.png "PCHMM 2022.9.1 (The Tattler 1946, Class Picture of 10c)")
Over the next couple of decades, as the school was rapidly expanding, the yearbooks also went through a noticeable change: as more and more photographs were included, there were fewer literary contributions. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, it became much more like a scrapbook of the school year, with school and student life shown in photographs.
.png "PCHMM 2005.3.2 (The Tattler 1981, Faces Page)")
As a historical resource, the yearbooks are also valuable records of the city’s business history. Local businesses supported the yearbook by purchasing ads in the publication, providing today’s researchers with a unique resource. Browsing through the pages of the Tattler one may trace the history of a community.
We are pleased to be able to make these resources available online, and share them as a part of our Archives Awareness Week 2025 celebrations. April 7th-11th have been designated by the Archives Association of Ontario to acknowledge the vital work and resources provided by archives across Ontario. This year the AAO is highlighting the theme of "Reflecting the Communities that Build Us" and we couldn't think of a better way to do so then by sharing the history of a community institution.
Subscribe