Archival Services
Dedicated team delights in the less-than-obvious
Step into the cool confines of 9 Wellington Street in downtown Brampton, and you enter another time and place. If you’re a history buff, photography master, architectural researcher, city planner, or genealogist, the Peel Archives makes your heart beat for Peel, the place we call home.
The people who care for our Archives are dedicated. Though serious, they delight in the less-than-obvious. Ask them a question about the little corner church in Caledon, a Brampton shopping mall, or where the Credit spills into Lake Ontario in Mississauga, and they’ll take you on a fantastical journey.
Jim Leonard has been working the Archives here in Peel since 2015. As Regional Archivist and Supervisor of Archival Services, he leads a small dedicated team who take pride and care in all matters of historical record and legislated responsibility. The Archives team processes and catalogues all municipal records for the Region, Brampton, Mississauga and the Town of Caledon. They also manage private sector records and research requests, keep records safe, and operate digitized services to retrieve records.
Archival Services received over 2,700 reference and research requests in 2018.
"The current records in the Archives would stretch about 1.5 kilometres," says Jim, peering over his glasses at the maps spread before him. "We house close to 2 million photographic images, hundreds of maps, plans, posters and microfilm resources, and an increasing number of digitized records. This collection is highly regarded, and we take our jobs as keepers of these treasures seriously."
Outside, the modern, bustling world of Brampton's main street traffic moves people forward, while just steps away, the world of the Archives slides us forwards and backwards through time, connecting us to who we are as a Region.
