They were founded on 2 September 1920 by the Legislative Assembly, with Pierre-Georges Roy as Quebec's first Head Archivist. His mandate was to take care of the archives collected since the time of New France and to implement a policy of selecting, preserving and making available public documents as well as private archives of public interest.
In 1961, they were brought under the jurisdiction of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and renamed the Archives de la Province de Québec in 1963. Today they represent the essential foundation of Quebec collective memory with no less than 67 linear kilometres of textual records, millions of photographs, thousands of films and some 13 million digitized documents. They continuously house the crucial records of 2,300 government departments and agencies. The public has free access to these archives, either online or in one of BAnQ's 10 archive centres throughout Quebec.

The Archives populaires de Pointe-Saint-Charles was established in 1997 as a community-based organization dedicated to collecting and promoting the archival heritage of the Pointe. Activities included preservation of its own institutional records, acquisition of records of local community organizations, preparation of finding aids based on its holdings, and exhibitions about factories that bordered the Lachine Canal and women's community organizing activities.

Sources gathered by the Archives populaires were used in the production of a book published in 2006 entitled Pointe Saint-Charles: un quartier des femmes, une historie communautaire/ The Point is... Grassroots Organizing Works! Women from Point St. Charles Sharing Stories of Solidarity.

The Archives populaires de Pointe-Saint-Charles was dissolved in 2007.

Edward John Ardley was born in July 1857 in Essex, England.

He was an assistant curator at Redpath Museum, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. He started as a janitor at the Peter Redpath Museum shortly after its opening in 1882. He took care of the collections and constructed the display stands and shelves. Three years later, Ardley began to clean, label and mount specimens due to the increasing size of the museum’s collections. He also learned to operate a lathe to slice sections of rocks and fossils. In 1894, he took charge of the museum specimens and earned the new title of "caretaker and museum assistant.” In 1911, he became a collector of fossils and rocks and a preparator of ethnological materials.

In 1886, he married Mary Anne O'Grady (1857–1888), and in 1888, he remarried Isabella Ross MacMillan (1851–1943). He died on January 11, 1922, in Montreal, Quebec.

Anton Stepanovich Arensky was born on July 12, 1861, in Novgorod, Russia.

He was a Russian composer and pianist. After studying with various teachers, he finally became a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov at the Conservatoire of St. Petersburg. In 1882, he became a Professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, and from 1894 to 1901, he was Director of music in the Imperial Chapel at St. Petersburg. His works consist mostly of chamber music, three operas (A Dream on the Volga, 1890; Raphael, 1894; and Nal and Damayanti, 1899), a ballet, several orchestral works (including a piano concerto, a violin concerto and two symphonies), many songs, and a large body of choral work, in addition to an extensive, though now sadly neglected, catalogue of works for his instrument, the piano. He had many friends and admirers, notably Tchaikovsky and Taneyev. Among his pupils were Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Glière, and Gretchaninov.

He died unmarried on February 25, 1906, in Terioki, Finland.