Quote:
Originally Posted by teddifax
What is the secret to actually finding buildings on this NS Archive site... I grew up in an old 4 unit apartment building, originally officers quarters that was torn down in the late 60's on the corner of Brunswick and Gerrish (SW corner), diagonally across from the Old Dutch Church and have never been able to locate a picture. Back in those days, it seems, no one had a camera, so we don't have any pictures of it....
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I can't say I have a 'secret' that works every time. In my case, I usually just do a search for terms that might be related to what I'm looking for - I start with very specific search terms, and if that doesn't work I broaden them out.
For example if I were searching for pics of the old Moirs factory on Argyle St., I would start searching for "Moirs factory" or "Moirs Argyle", and if that didn't yield results, I'd broaden it to simply "Moirs", or "Argyle", or "factory", or even "chocolate". If still no results, I might consider other views that might show it, like "Grand Parade", "Scotia Square", etc.
The more broad you get, the more results you will have to sift through. A while ago I was searching for some general old buildings downtown, and I ended up searching "street". You can imagine how many results that yielded.
Then, more times than not, I'll find something I had been looking for previously, while looking for something else...
On archives sites, you are at the mercy of how it was labeled. If mislabeled or labeled "unknown" you might just have to get lucky. In your case I'd probably start with the streets, then maybe search "officers quarters", or "military", etc. Then you might also try searching aerial photographs, sometimes labeled 'aerial' but not always. More often than not, it comes down to luck.
And, don't limit yourself to NS Archives, try Halifax Municipal Archives, and others. There are also facebook pages and online albums that contain old Halifax photos. I've also found things by doing a Google image search - sometimes you get lucky.
Basically, be tenacious and don't give up if you can't find it at first. Sometimes new images are added to archives sites as well.
I haven't done this, but if you physically visit the archives, I believe that there would be a number of photos that haven't been scanned to online sites yet, so it may exist there...
Good luck!