Usha Rautenbach, moved to Salt Spring Island in 1983 after being a weekender for two years. Intrigued by the history of her new home which is on the site of the the Divide School, an early one-room schoolhouse, Usha approached the archives to find out something about the school. She found an amazing collection in its cramped quarters, staffed by Mary and Agnes. “I feel a happy debt.” she said. Usha is now a regular volunteer at the archives researching the early one-room schools of Saltspring and the lives of the pioneers as well as indexing collections. She hopes to one day begin to interview seniors and record their memories of the island.
Usha once spent a year doing medieval research in the Reading Room of the London Museum. She loves the history of ordinary people and greatly admires the pioneering spirit of the nineteenth century. She loves it when people from off Island turn up looking for information and Mary roots around and finds it. The Archivists learn lots more about an old Island family.
Usha expresses her love of the archives, “I love it when a finickity little anomaly arising from a census entry or a church baptismal record has been niggling away at your consciousness for months, and suddenly you come upon the clue - maybe a caption on the back of an old photograph - that suddenly rattles all the pieces of knowledge into place in a domino effect, and the matter is settled, all makes perfect sense, and your mind is at rest. I love it that other people think that's weird! It is so insignificant. But so very satisfying.’
‘Salt Spring's Archives are the most amazing resource. We are very lucky here. From prolific early photographs of high quality on glass negatives, to eleven years of the extraordinarily busy Rev. Wilson's monthly parish magazine, to an incredible collection of taped recordings dating back to the sixties - and so much more, the collection is unusually rich in material. The history itself I find rather special also.