Judging a Book by its Cover: Making Sense of Sources and Silences in the History of Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Rural Nova Scotia

By Sarah Kittilsen

In the summer of 2025, I was rifling through a box of uncatalogued materials at the Farm Equipment Museum in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, when I happened upon an old record book. Tattered and yellowed with age, it had been used by fourteen-year-old Frank Daniels in the early 1930s to document what he expended and earned while raising his calf, Princess Pet.
But that wasn’t what struck me about the record book. I wasn’t particularly interested in the money Daniels had spent, nor the pounds of milk Princess Pet had consumed, nor how tall she had measured in the month of May. It was scarce on these details anyway, since Daniels had only filled out the first two pages. It was the cover, instead, that caught my eye. Between the crisp typeface, Daniels had scribbled in big, pencilled letters: “Prize Ribbons in here, Do not destroy.”

Daniels’ record book offers a rare glimpse into how young people experienced Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in rural Nova Scotia during the early to mid-twentieth century. Daniels was a member of the Claradise Calf Feeding Club in Western Nova Scotia, one of the many Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs that the state organized across the province during the interwar years. Although thousands of rural youngsters joined Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs across the province, their stories are surprisingly slippery. Archival methodologies and political policies have made it difficult to find young voices in the archives altogether. Daniels’ record book, then, serves as a unique case study. It highlights the challenges that afflict youth history and exemplifies how unconventional sources can be instructive for historians studying how young people experienced adult-led programs.

The Extension Service of the provincial Department of Agriculture administered the Boys’ and Girls’ Club program in Nova Scotia from 1926 to 1952, before it was rebranded as 4-H, a popular youth development program in Canada today.^[1] By using practical instruction and recreation to promote modernization and liberal citizenship, officials believed Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs would help curb rural depopulation and distress in the province. If rural life could be made more profitable and enjoyable, they argued, rural youngsters would be less inclined to abandon the countryside to search for the good life in the city.^[2]

Fieldworkers from the Extension Service organized agricultural and homemaking clubs around a single project, working with local leaders to help members run meetings, learn skills, and prepare for competitions. By the early 1930s, the Extension Service offered roughly a dozen projects to Boys’ and Girls’ Club members across the province, the most popular being calf, garden, and garment.

The Extension Service incorporated record-keeping into Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs to promote scientific and market-oriented production to rural young people. To improve the profitability and satisfaction of rural life, officials believed that they needed to learn to be diligent and meticulous managers of their future farms and homes. No matter if the club was an agricultural or homemaking one, members were expected to tabulate their expenditures, returns, and experiences to help make their projects more efficient. In her study of American Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in the early twentieth century, Ciaran B. Trace, a scholar of information studies, argued that clubs acted as “sponsors of literacy” in rural communities. Modern farmers and homemakers were supposed to be rational, technological, and thrifty, all traits that counted on their ability to read, write, and do arithmetic. Officials in Nova Scotia feared that rural schoolhouses were ill-equipped to cultivate this kind of literacy and economy in the next generation of rural men and women, a shortcoming they hoped Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs would help resolve.

It’s difficult to know how young people reacted to record-keeping. Most of the available sources on Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs were produced by adults, in particular government employees. These officials pumped out documents—reports, bulletins, articles, manuals, and more—to record, regulate, and promote how clubs operated across the province. And while officials solicited essays, updates, and photographs from members to incorporate into them, these publications offer only a curated window into youth experiences.

Officials used print materials to highlight the members who excelled in their club work and brushed over those who didn’t. In 1942, for example, the Extension Service encouraged members to submit short essays on the topic “my community and war activities” that could “be used for publicity purposes.”^[3] In addition to awarding them war bonds, the Extension Service featured prize-winning members and their essays in farm and community presses, including its own Boys’ and Girls’ Club Bulletin.^[4]

To make matters more difficult, member-created sources are few and far between in digital and physical archives, despite the many that exist in personal collections across the province. Silences enter the historical record at multiple junctures, as anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued. In addition to the “making of sources,” the “making of archives” influences whose stories are preserved.^[5] When I interviewed former members of postwar 4-H clubs, they often indicated that they saw their surviving scrapbooks, awards, life writings, and handicrafts as family keepsakes, with little more than personal value, rather than historical documents or artifacts with important insight into the past. These feelings bespeak the broader patterns that shape what sources are and are not available to researchers of youth history.

Young people produced unconventional sources about their lives; they don’t look like the letters, briefs, and ledgers that one might associate with “the archive.” Social hierarchies influence which materials are deemed worthy of preservation and which ones are catalogued in, at best, the miscellaneous fond at the archive, or, at worst, land in the local dump. Young voices—especially those of girls, working-class, and racialized youths—are overlooked as serious authorities on the past and far too often slip through the archival cracks.^[6] This is a concerning trend, one that the neoliberal crusade against Canada’s heritage sector will only worsen.

I was lucky, then, to find Daniels’ record book. And it’s no coincidence that it was stored uncatalogued in a Rubbermaid tote at the back of a small seasonal museum that runs on volunteer labour.

I want to be careful, though, not to overstate its importance. Daniels’ record book cannot alone make up for the systemic silences that trouble youth history, and it must not be used to paint the whole membership with a wide brush. Young people had a broad range of experiences in Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Nova Scotia, even if many of them are absent or obscured in the archives.

Daniels’ record book can, however, offer up insights that probe our understanding of how young people experienced Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Nova Scotia—insights that can only emerge if we take his young voice seriously, and situate it against the unspoken assumptions that inspired his decision to write on the cover.

Marking it with “Prize Ribbons in here, Do not destroy,” Daniels found reason to fear that someone might damage or dispose of his record book, although it’s not clear for whom he left the note. Perhaps an earlier record book had met an unfortunate fate, falling into the hands of a parent searching for tinder, or a sibling in want of a colouring book. Or maybe Daniels made a habit of repurposing his old record books for work or play and wanted to be sure that he wouldn’t mistake this one.

Either way, the directive is telling. It reveals a tension between how the state viewed record-keeping in Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs and how some members experienced it. Young people participated in clubs for unique reasons—shaped by their own ideas, values, and desires—that sometimes defied the state’s agenda. The state wanted rural folks to take record books seriously. They were bibles of efficiency, tools to be treasured, resources to be harnessed, not playthings to be haphazardly repurposed or ruined after the season ended. Daniels, however, had an alternative vision for his record book. It made a fine place to store his hard-earned ribbons, a cause he deemed more worthy of his attention than some accounts and their promises of far-off profits.

It is not surprising that Daniels valued joining, and maybe winning, competitions more than his records. Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs in Nova Scotia used competition to appeal to youth culture, a controversial part of the program. Some provincial and national officials worried that competition overshadowed education in the Boys’ and Girls’ Club curriculum. Others, however, argued that competition and the accompanying fanfare attracted rural young people to the program. The incentive to win something, especially something modern, was appealing to young eyes. As Holly Buck argued in her analysis of Utah 4-H, members used rural youth clubs to affirm their modern identity, finding avenues to consume and socialize within its programming. In Nova Scotia, triumphant members won prizes, including trophies, ribbons, cash, and trips, that allowed them to experience “coming of age” in a modern and industrial country. For members like Daniels, then, ribbons were more than symbols of success. They were claims to youthhood.

The biggest lesson I learned from Daniels’ record book, however, is that young people are powerful agents. They can tell their own stories if heritage workers are empowered to listen to them. Youths are elusive subjects for the historian. They produced unconventional sources about their lives, and archival silences make it difficult and uncomfortable for scholars to seek them out. Without a radical reinvestment in Canada’s heritage sector, this problem will persist. Yet, even within these confines, opportunities arise for historians to listen and learn from the lives of young people. And if we’re willing to ask more questions than there are answers, find comfort in conjecture and, sometimes, judge an old record book by its cover, the young voices we find might just surprise us.

Sarah Kittilsen is a graduate student at McGill University and a Junior Fellow with Active History. Her ongoing M.A. thesis examines the history of rural youth clubs in Nova Scotia. She thanks Raffaella Cerenzia for comments on this post.

This post was produced within the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 

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[1] Before the provincial Department of Agriculture christened its Extension Service in 1926, provincial and federal agricultural representatives administered a handful of livestock clubs for rural youth in Nova Scotia. The Mayflower Boys’ Ayrshire Club, organized in Antigonish County in 1922, is often cited as the first Boys’ and Girls’ Club in Nova Scotia.

[2] Jean Matheson Munro, “Boys’ and Girls’ Club Work in Nova Scotia” (B.Sc., Mount Allison University, 1932), 6, 15-16, 40-41; and Nova Scotia, Report of the Agricultural Enquiry Committee, 1926 (King’s Printer, 1926), 7-8, 26-27.

[3] “New Essay Competition for Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs,” Nova Scotia Boys’ and Girls’ Club Bulletin 4, no. 2 (November 1940): 1. Collection of Farm Equipment Museum, Bible Hill, Nova Scotia.

[4] “Win Prizes in Essay Contests,” Nova Scotia Boys’ and Girls’ Club Bulletin 5, no. 6 (July 1942): 5. Collection of Farm Equipment Museum, Bible Hill, Nova Scotia.

[5] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995), 26.  Emphasis in original. 

[6] Scholars of child and youth history have discussed these difficulties. For a couple of examples, see: Kristine Alexander, “Can the Girl Guides Speak? The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research,” Jeunesse: Young Peoples, Texts, Cultures 4, no 1. (2012): 132-145; and Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 45. For a discussion on how class shapes sources of rural youth history, see: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (University Press of Kansas, 2005), 6.