Missisquoi’s Mercantile Past: As Seen through Consumer Goods and Ledgers at the Missisquoi Museum

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Business account books or ledgers from the 19th and early twentieth centuries are a valuable resource
for the study of rural history. Historians have used account books to reveal their subjects’ community through the markets they operated in, the people they dealt with, and the goods they produced and consumed. The time that went into creating these ledgers reveals the importance of the daily relationships they recorded.
The accuracy of the ledgers and the success of the early stores depended entirely on the probity of the merchant who operated the business and whose steady hand recorded the daily hustle and bustle in his store. That attention to detail in many of the Missisquoi County ledgers now offers the researcher a unique picture of the social life and the exchanges of commodities in this newly populated area of the Eastern Townships.
  

 I am presently transcribing  the
Stanbridge Acct Day Book  Stanbridge Quebec 1823

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