McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Correspondence
Series
2.6 cm of textual records
This series consists of business and personal correspondence created by and received by James Morrison in his capacity as a trader and merchant. Most of the correspondence is between Morrison and his business contacts in Quebec, Ontario, the Northern United States, and England. Some letters are from family members and contain both business and personal news, including Morrison's nephew, Samuel Morrison, in Baltimore, Morrison's brother-in-law, Charles LePallieur, who worked as a fur trader in Ontario and the United States, and Morrison's son, Charles Morrison, who travelled to Jamaica in search of work. Many of the letters in this series contain interesting information about the price and availability of various goods, especially wheat, rum, sugar, and molasses.
The letters in the series are grouped by intervals of 5 or 10 years into files of roughly similar size: 1770s (Correspondence, 1771-1776), 1780s (Correspondence, 1781-1789), the first half of the 1790s (Correspondence, 1790-1795), and the second half of the 1790s (Correspondence, 1795-1800). The letters are arranged in chronological order.