Aberdeen Lord Provost Peter Stephen today launched the city's new online home for thousands of historic photographs and records at the Central Library. The 'Silver City Vault' makes the Aberdeen Local Studies archive available free to remote users for the very first time.
Online visitors can do everything from tracing an Aberdeen ancestor to glimpsing Victorian life through old photographs, many of which were captured in stunning detail by renowned photographer George Washington Wilson.
The resource contains over a thousand images of the city – including long-vanished buildings, the construction of famous landmarks, businesses which have come and gone, trams on Union Street, and horse-drawn carriages waiting at the Castlegate to take passengers down to the beach. The collection also features hundreds of images of people, landmarks and special events, such as royal visits to the city.
In addition, the website contains over 40,000 index records for events like marriage notices and newspaper obituaries and more than 10,000 articles from local journals covering individuals, organisations and events. And family historians can now search for their Aberdeen ancestors among the 30,000 personal names in the Local Studies Combined Index, with entries ranging from obituaries and notices of marriage in the Aberdeen Journal to lists of 'paupers' in the parishes of the city, chiefly drawn from the Victorian period.
The official press release can be found here, and the archive, created with the help of funding from the Scottish Government's Scottish Library and Information Council, is located here.
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