212_25-Years_Salt-Spring-Archives.mp3

otter.ai

30.03.2023

no

Unknown Speaker 0:00
So the other ones I just wanted to say

Unknown Speaker 0:27
Charles

Unknown Speaker 0:32
I was gonna open you up with you books were too bad. I didn't have the title of that. Could have. Oh yeah, pretty good hospital. This one here's a movie, zooming in or panning around different places. This one here

Unknown Speaker 0:59
we have a short business meeting before we purchase destination anyway. So we'll start now about the rest of the products filter in five minutes of the last general meeting please.

Unknown Speaker 1:19
minutes of the last

Unknown Speaker 1:20
general meeting Wednesday, September 12 2007. Vice President Duncan have already called the meeting to order at 210. He welcomed everyone mentioning that President Bob Woodward here was unable to attend lucky him he was on a cruise. He pointed out that membership would be $10 with BC historical and this is scripture being an additional $12 invited everyone to sign the guestbook. He thanked Jenny brush Emily Hepburn and Agnes Cunningham for looking after refreshments. minutes of April the 11th 2007. Read and adopted with the secretary Jeanne rush and Miss Cunningham correspondence a thank you card from Tom Wright we commendation class and honorary membership ordered at the AGM. Various bulletins from BC historical society were announced and placed at the table in front for members to peruse. Treasurer's Report, Duncan mentioned that there were there was considerable activity, income $9,178 expenses $7,992 This activity is related to the archives Saltspring foundation $2,000 for computer equipment, the Irving K Barbour foundation 1004 from the foundation 4000 from the archives and 4000 from income work for digitization of materials. Hudson's Bay Company $1,000 for preparing school lessons relating to connect at Heritage bank that balance is $5,435 term deposits of 8206 2000 8000 part of a $626 for a total of $14,061. Membership. Susan good 20 members signed up today. Archives report now open Monday afternoons as well as Thursday morning program October a virtual tour of the archives. November Nora they are on Salt Spring parks. Duncan asked for volunteers to assist with coffee and goodies throughout the year. A sign up sheet was passed around barber Dumela and asked volunteers to sign up to supervise the museum at the Fall fair. This is meeting adjourned at 2:18pm moved and we have Brian Duncan introduce the speakers, Susan Jones, Rob Johnson, Tom Wagner and Kip Roma, from the latest Smith Historical Society, who gave an excellent presentation of the history of DataSmith and the ENN railway. At the end of their talk, Duncan, thank them on behalf of everyone present for refreshments fold.

Unknown Speaker 4:09
Are there any errors or omissions? And then we'll adopt the minutes. Any correspondence, no correspondence, Duncan financial statement, please. Just read it

Unknown Speaker 4:21
from here. Very little change in the last report, which was fairly detailed. The total remains just over $14,000 and know that there's a remaining commitment of about 3000. The RV archive is part of the Barbour digitization project. And that will be spent over the next few months.

Unknown Speaker 4:41
Membership Susan,

Unknown Speaker 4:43
we had 10 new members today for a total of 36 members.

Unknown Speaker 4:49
Flipboard that's here as for signing up for people goodies. I'll pass it around if you're going to be coming to our meeting in January. We have a space February. We have Let's face it from me, so many of you can help us out with this. We appreciate it. So very pleased to hear. Today we have our coffee and tea is prepared and will be given to us later on in the program by Jen Dunn and Barb Lynn guard. Also, we have a special presentation all mentioned just a minute as part of our end of program. Mary, you want to have a few minutes, please, Mary Davidson, our Archive Manager.

Unknown Speaker 5:35
This is just a very

Unknown Speaker 5:35
brief welcome back to one of our members, who left us for a while and has now returned. And you're very, very

Unknown Speaker 5:43
thankful to have been done. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 5:52
So would you.

Unknown Speaker 5:55
I think Mary comes first I'm not ready.

Unknown Speaker 5:57
This is sort of the other thing very he's already done it. So we have a special special event happening. And Sue mode has brought it forward today. And I've asked her to speak for a minute or two on this particular events, but not part of her major presentation. You can skip this is going to interrelate just tell us what we're celebrating today in a few words and then expand on it later. Okay, but

Unknown Speaker 6:22
we were starting to look around for materials today. And we suddenly realized we're 25 years old and Historical Society Have you done anything about it? Got a cake.

Unknown Speaker 6:33
So you've got a cake.

Unknown Speaker 6:36
So happy birthday to us. Anything about library Duncan? No, nope, nothing when the library. Okay, thank you. That I think concludes our business meeting. I can't think of anything else. I will mention that on Sunday night in this theater. Peter princes program on Burgoyne Bay is going to be shown again, seven o'clock by donation is the history of the Burgoyne Valley. If you haven't seen it, it'll be in this theater. Sunday night, seven o'clock, any proceeds from that particular program will be donated to the archives. So that will be happening this Sunday. So that adjourn the business meeting. And I'll let the lady set up for their presentation meeting and then Mary will take over the program of that time. So me now adjourn. Now you have to move. Thank you. Emails. Okay. This is the light

Unknown Speaker 8:01
I know No, no. That's good. Whatever. Okay, who's going to be up your bars? Are you on part of this presentation? Well, I am too. I'm at the end. Okay. All right.

Unknown Speaker 8:19
We start with married.

Unknown Speaker 8:25
Well, welcome, ladies and gentleman to virtual archives.

Unknown Speaker 8:32
This is a program to show you what the archives what it contains,

Unknown Speaker 8:39
and an excellent staff. Who are the people responsible

Unknown Speaker 8:49
for this work?

Unknown Speaker 8:52
I don't know if Frank's doing anything besides all this filming. So I don't mention him because he probably won't be talking to you as our webmaster and responsible for putting Well, everything that the archives is today. He's really done a remarkable job of putting us on the map, you might say. And we are all standing behind him 100% Now, I don't know who I start with here. I have a script coming up next

Unknown Speaker 9:39
to my wife has been working with your tests since the inception quite a long time ago

Unknown Speaker 9:47
in 1989, and she will give you a brief history of British history

Unknown Speaker 10:05
One thing to remember about the archives as it is, do any of this. Yes. One thing we have to remember about the archives it is part of the Historical Society.

Unknown Speaker 10:18
And so this is a very brief

Unknown Speaker 10:19
little history of as often archives is under the umbrella of a surplus society, which organization was incorporated under the society's act 1982. Earlier that year, a planning meeting has been held at Fannie Mae losses. And a temporary slate of officers for the Historical Society was named Henry may awesome was the chair of plate and treasurer, Brenda Cornwell secretary, Mabel Holtby, with the telephone contract, contact person. projects of immediate concern with a collection and copying of old photographs of people and places on the island, and will be the responsibility of Tom Ford. Also, continuing taping and interviewing old timers would be the responsibility days a year, whose daughter is he back then? I'm certain that Historical Society was snowed under with collected material costs rise and Mr. Bullets and material from a group who were collecting for our museum. And other than that, in 1989, during her tenure as president, Mary Davidson, as the as your vice president, Peggy Tolson, bewildered by the amount of stuff that was being donated and, and an acute shortage of space, apply for a Heritage Trust grant. to their amazement, they received $8,000. The historical society but equally amazed to learn the archives would be it would be their baby, then Historical Society. Next meeting, a motion was made. To support the project with Mary and Hagee as volunteer archivists. The library gave women permission to keep a filing cabinet in the corner of the book repair room. Soon after a windfall grant of $30,000 made it possible to create a separate room in the library based on the archives in its present form was born. The Archives website was created by Frank Newman in 2000. He thinks, and already has an astounding 10,000 images already on our website, and which is absolutely amazing, and most of it is bilingual. Anyway, that's all I have for you. And you're going next, Barb is going to talk to you. I'm not sure what you're going to talk about.

Unknown Speaker 13:12
I'm in my talk is on what is the archives. But before I go into describing the archives, I would like to sort of emphasize the importance of archives. individuals and communities have always preserved their collective memories through record keeping. And they did this by there's painting on caves, engraving on clay tablets, oral tradition, and in the modern day, we have the archives. So you can see where we would be if we didn't have these cave drawings and tablets and the oral tradition to fall back on. So we still have to preserve our history now. Now I'm going to explain the archives and I'm going to put it into three sections. One, the physical building, which is we call the archives. The second one is the material that goes into the archives. And the third one is the workers, the archivists. Archives, the physical site can be a complete building, or it can be part of a building. And in our case, the Saltspring Island archives is part of a building. We are in the basement, a small portion of the basement and the library. Ideally, archives are in three sections. You have a area for the holdings and that should be locked under lock and key and only the staff should be able to go in there. And then you'd have another part where the staff work within that you have a table and lots of areas to work on. And then you have another area for the researchers with a table so they can do their work. We have to accommodate all of that into one small area. But we do it quite effectively. The Archives is the humidity is controlled, it is environmentally controlled. And it is a safe place to leave your materials. Now we'll go on to the archival materials. The museums collect artifacts, the libraries collect published writings. The art galleries collect works of art. And the Arclight archives collect original, unique and unpublished items.

Unknown Speaker 15:43
They are non

Unknown Speaker 15:45
current records, meaning they're sort of history, which document the activities of individuals and organizations. And they come in many mediums. We have photographs, maps, architectural drawings, video and audio cassettes, and computer discs. Now for the workers, which we call the archivists. All of the archivists on Saltspring Island archives are volunteers. We have no paid staff, the duties of the archivist, they appraise, select, acquire, preserve, and make available for use archival records. The archivists promote responsible physical custodianship of these records for the benefit of the present users and future generations. Archivists encourage and promote the greatest possible use of these records in their care giving due attention to personal privacy and confidentiality, and important part the preservation of the records. And in closing, I would like to mention ways that you can help check out your family history and information that you are that you would have pertaining to Saltspring Island. And when you are donating material to the archives, please write what they are is very valuable for us to have a way to identify these pictures and the things that we are collecting. And if you do not want to part with your original photographs, then contact an archive member. And we will arrange to have them scanned and returned the original studio that will preserve your pictures for future generations. But a good preserve your pictures for now. And I'll give you an example of the American Army family. They donated their archives to be scanned and took the originals home. Only had they had the misfortune of having a fire in their home and they lost their additionals but the archives was able to give them back copies of their pictures. I have given you a small overview of the archives and the materials that we collect and the work that the archives archivists do. Now we're going to go on to get a viewpoint of what a researcher does when they go to the archives. Our next speaker is a researcher. She also contributes to the archive she's an archivist and a valuable member of the Historical Society. Please help me welcome su Moines.

Unknown Speaker 18:49
I really I took a lot of my own stuff in because I had a lot of noise stuff. I just thought another generation that will all be gone. But when I'm down there what I really like doing this reading the Old driftwood or the old spotlights or revenue Wilson's we have a really quite good library down there. And what books we don't have we often have photocopied pages of the relevant stuff like er Cartwright's book, the late summer, where he spent a year on Saltspring and it's a very refreshing read about how he used to ride his horse to look after the telephone lines, standing on his horses saddle to tie the lines together. And I just love wall brands. Please names of early British Columbia or

Unknown Speaker 19:48
coastal British Columbia as of course,

Unknown Speaker 19:49
we're talking about Erskine. This was apparently the most pleasant man in the British Navy, who had abandons three ships, and they aren't picked up one last time floating in the Atlantic later, just kind of see him and he was I gather he was wonderful surveyor, but not much of a captain. But just reading the Old drift was, it's fascinating to see how host postprocessor changed and what people were fighting about them was the sewer or whatever it was, anyway, there's just an endless reading there. And very good things like vital stats, most of the church references are there. There are files on nearly every family, and nearly every business. And it just haven't been time.

Unknown Speaker 20:51
So next, we'd like to ask you to come up and tell us how about you makes use of the archives?

Unknown Speaker 21:02
Do I have to hold this? Well, first, I'd like to say something about Sue, because probably most of you don't know that. Just about everything we know about Saltspring comes from Sue. She's been writing books, little books, organizing, history, writing groups. And so much of the important material in the archives comes from Sue. So Sue, and I now produced a history of the hospital, which will be available next week, I hope everybody will buy it. Because all net proceeds go to the hospital Foundation. And this, this is an interesting project in departing a little bit from the archives, but if it does come back to the archives, Sue has written a history of healthcare on so on Saltspring some years ago, and people in the hospital had also done some research in the 80s. And I inherited all this material. So you know, good foundation of this is Sue's work. And then my my rewriting of a lot of this material, and a lot of his material comes out of the archives. So one of the things I was going to say was that in writing this book, a lot of materials come from the archives, when there was an opportunity to put in some graphic material that we didn't have. Frank was able to provide it, which is a fantastic thing. I would also like to pay a lot of credit to Frank, because Frank has made the archives so much more available to all of us through through the computer and scanning photos, and so on. It's just you can't say enough about, about what Frank has done. It's just an amazing, amazing thing. To just tell you a few things about how I use the archives. And I'm also sort of volunteering in the archives right now. And it's giving me an opportunity to find out a bit more about the contents of the archives. Anyway, to begin with, there's there's photos, photos that Frank has scanned, but also there are lots of them in the archives. There are vertical files that are part of collections. You can find, for example, I wanted to illustrate this in court because if the court has some some involvement in the early hospital, and his house was used as a as a clinic for a while, so these were pictures I was able to pick up from the archives. They were in vertical files. Frank was able to supply them it was terrific. So that's a source of information. Tapes, tapes are phenomenal resource. When I wrote the history of Saltspring, the tapes were invaluable. I would sit upstairs in the house listening to tapes, and I would hear Judy below yelling shut your door. Because she would kill them while listening to the tapes. But I spent hours listening to these tapes. And because really, in telling me stories, I'm not telling my story. I wasn't here and telling somebody else's story. So it's great to be able to hear them telling their story and some of you are on the tapes. Here you telling your stories, and be able to quote literally from the horse's mouth. It's nice to be able to have people like Marguerite around who can call when I'm desperate and say what do you remember about such and such. And sometimes that's that's very helpful. There's a story of Marguerite supplied in this book too, which was kind of fun. So the tapes are a great source. And the tapes are not just individuals because they've been there been a number of different tape projects, where Tony far did a lot of interviews and those are really useful and Ruth Sandwell did a whole lot and airtripp terrifically useful, but There's also tapes of these presentations. And they've been terrifically useful as well. So there's, there's a lot of oral history in the archives, which which we can't, you know, can't get in any other way. Then they're all the boxes, you saw a picture before of the archives. And they're all of those boxes. And those are individual collections that people have donated. And whenever we find somebody who has original material, we always encourage them to donate it to the archives, because if it's lost, we'll never we'll never get that information again. Whereas if it's in the archives, we all have access to it. And there's some incredibly useful information. In those boxes, I'm just beginning to to just find out about a lot of a lot of them as I as I sit in the archives on Monday afternoons, looking at looking at the material there is a our library also have, like our archives also has a lot of what really is library material that is very useful for researchers, collections of books, periodicals, a number of you know clippings, we have a lot of vertical files with clippings. And these are all very useful if you want to find the birth and death dates of someone, for example, or something about what they get, chances are, you'll find something in the archives. And this isn't something that is common to most archives, because, as Bob said, archives tend to be about things that are unpublished in from the past, but they are quite useful to a researcher. And I also want to mention something that Frank created, that's been very useful. And that's this little group of people called gossip. And what happens is, somebody will send in a query, and everybody gets on it, maybe it's something to do with the photograph, you know, who's in the photograph? Or? Well, for example, there were a few photographs that we got that I included in here. And we didn't know who the people were. And if you send it to enough people, eventually you might find out who who's in the photographs. So this little group of gossip, you ended up researching a whole lot of things. Recently, a question that was just

Unknown Speaker 27:19
fences, a fence, fence,

Unknown Speaker 27:22
fence idea, and I was thinking of the the most recent,

Unknown Speaker 27:25
the jam factory.

Unknown Speaker 27:28
Yeah, jam fest. Yeah. And all the information about where the jam factory was, and where the telephone exchanges were. That was quite, quite interesting. And everybody came in with some some bit of information. And so you end up with a lot more information than was originally asked for. But that's great, because it expands our knowledge of the island. And since we're so distant from these things that happened so far back in the past each year, it's a little bit farther in the past, it's great that people can can can do this. And I just want to end by by giving you one other example of an interesting thing that happened through the archives. That's just going on. Right now. As you probably know, I wrote a little book call with Chris Hadfield on his property down and pushing code. And one of the, one of the great sources of information there was a grandson of William Bowman, the man who started the the mail, we saw mail back in 1909 on that site, and just about the time the book was being published, a granddaughter got in touch with the archives. And Mary directed her to me. And she's actually coming to Salt Spring on Sunday. And we'll be here for about four days. And Chris says has generously offered to put her out and she's going to be staying at his place, Christian Cove. And it was really quite interesting, because we did a lot of emailing back and forth. And I was telling her things about her family that she didn't know, which is really bizarre. And she now has found out a few more things and has been doing a lot of research in Britain and hopefully she will bring some of that to us. But that's a neat thing that that developed as a result of the archives. If any of you have any information or interested in meeting this woman, she will be here for about four or five days with her sisters, two sisters, and they both granddaughters of William Bowman, who started the sawmill in Cushing code. So that's kind of a neat thing. So anyway, those are a few of the things I wanted to share with you. I think I took more than my five minutes.

Unknown Speaker 29:46
Thank you, Charles. And I don't need to take more than your five minutes when we say most of the things that I plan to cut I'm grateful for that because you're wonderfully descriptive. Anyway you might Porsche I have this presentation is going to be the website, this Saltspring Archives website. So for those of us interested in history Saltspring has a state of the art resource. We're fortunate that Mary Davidson, who adapts extraordinarily well to technology found and recruited Frank Newman, who has applied his skills and abilities to building our website. Now, you don't even need to visit the archive room itself, you can learn so much just by sitting at home and going online. So interestingly, last month, 22 of 26 new members have email addresses. So now more than ever, before people can indulge in exploring our rich history. So Frank puts many hours into making magic scanning and organizing donated photographs and documents, as well as audio interviews. And as Charles said, our presentations that we have here, they're all available on the website. Over time, the website is filling out with an enormous body of historical information. So we got the website address, Frank. Well, that's good. That's good. So we were just that the title page. And I think it was Charles, it said that most of the material is translated into French. Our collections, we have more than 75 collections of photographs. And some of them have individual are individually described. And some are still in need of descriptions. So if you notice on the left hand column, the ones that are already described, are in bold, and the others aren't. So this is an ongoing task that's done by the volunteers. And we're really receptive to any help in filling in all the descriptions of photographs. There are articles to read. There's a brief history of the island or an introduction to First Nations history in the Gulf Islands by Chris Arnett. In the multi multicultural section, there are many collections from the First Nations, the Black Sea, Japanese, the Chinese and the Hawaiians. And in the Links section, which I find really interesting, we have links to vital statistics such as Births, Deaths and Marriages, as census results, voters list, I actually found my grandfather in the 1898 voters list in New Westminster. It's kind of exciting. I now know where he lived, which I didn't before. The volunteers in the archives, we meet weekly on Thursday mornings, but we also communicate via email. And as Charles was saying, we do have the Saltspring Bureau of Investigation or the SBI. And there is an example that we've chosen. Let's see if we can find those photographs. Or we've chosen one of the investigations, which was St. Paul's Church, and the fence around St. Paul's Church. If an effort is made to build a new fence, using the original proportions of the fence, the SPI took two examining old photos to find out how high the fence is, or how high you build it. So here at some point we have we have those photographs. Or maybe we don't.

Unknown Speaker 33:55
So when the first photograph, it was just it was taken in the late 1880s. And, and the fence had flat, the pickets were flat at the top, and you could see crosses in the background. And one of the photographs, there's some children and they're standing behind the fence, so we had to try and guess how old the children were, so we could get some idea how tall they would be in which case how high the fence would be. Okay, so in the second photograph, we had pointed pickets, and the third one, there were actually two fences in the front of the church and one behind. And the fourth photograph, there were no graves there yet. On the fifth chose, there's graves there, but there's no fence. There's just a gate and it has pointed pickets. So everybody was examining these photographs really closely. If you click on them, you get a large, large view. So you can get Write in there and see who was there. So Frank's having trouble because I, I've actually deleted quite a bit of my presentation. Because I realized I'd be going over time considerably over time. And we didn't get a chance to go over that. So this is entirely. So there are also cemetery records returned in progress. And we have lists of the graves and cemeteries we also have some cemeteries that have photographs of the gravestones. And the Saltspring Genealogical Society has been helping us working on the pretty Cunningham Memorial Cemetery and the Ganges community, some cemetery, and correctors, correcting some of the errors and adding information that's not there. So we really appreciate the work they're doing. So now we get to the most interesting part, our audio files, of which there are almost 100 on the website. So I'm most captivated by these audio files, it sounds like most people are. And it was a big challenge to choose which ones are just going to listen to for short captions. So we have chosen for small segments of the many stories and memories that have been captured on tape.

Unknown Speaker 36:30
Listening to these stories, especially early days of slavery in the travel cross country, with no thought of putting it into the manuscript. And it was as time went on, she felt that the family should know all of this their early history and origin. And so that gave her the idea that this minister, and before I came here, she had written a handwritten and quite a bit of notes and whatnot. And we had an old Underwood typewriter if it wasn't very good typewriter, this by the mechanist the arrows and whatnot, and in there, and so I told her, she was doing a sort of finger and I taught her some touch, you know, like, using a typewriter, which she was unable to do much faster. And so then she became very, very interested. In fact, she amaze me. She found her dinner fear at around six no evening, and she go immediately to her typewriter in the room and type steadily for one o'clock at night, night after night. At the age it was really, I just wanted to stand on because I didn't think I could do so. Maybe three different but you can do that.

Unknown Speaker 37:54
So that was Myrtle Holloman who was still be a start granddaughter. The second caption me chosen is Ruth Hi Nikki as Iris Patterson, who are the Goodrich sisters from Vesuvius here. They were interviewed 30 years ago,

Unknown Speaker 38:10
five sons and he was always known this

Unknown Speaker 38:17
blog was

Unknown Speaker 38:19
originally it was a store come soon post office, what have you. And where was the launch? Right at the service war. What was lacking enormous hotel. It had many and varied illnesses either for us in fact, we call it the hospital. It was a brief kid that could refuse. And we were l'esprit with my dad found out we were doing. He sees the imported coal mines and copper mines are excavation for the same. Call nine one

Unknown Speaker 39:02
Dogbane.

Unknown Speaker 39:05
On the map, you'll find that except that originally that was known as offI because it was so shocking that for the soup system, and his idea of keeping his sights on busy and overseas. He didn't mind making other people that slipping off his sons that was busy and one of his major projects was fence, wood cutting, break water making all these things that had no beginning no end, in the back of our property from who my

Unknown Speaker 39:38
dad bought from

Unknown Speaker 39:42
is about five miles of sake fences that go nowhere have no fields or nothing. And when asked about this, he said, Well, how the hell are you going to keep pi voice video? This isn't a keyword. There's a corns award out there. And some simple ones Just kind of forms for boats or ships. I know Kevin. He had the authority to make some new Disney after date is something that's restless and authority, none of us have it.

Unknown Speaker 40:22
So the next caption is Joan Milner and this was done by our own Tony fire on March 2 1984. And Joan is describing more store in the 1940s. Oops. No, no, no

Unknown Speaker 40:42
dear. When the hardware department is now was the grocery department, and it has stairs going up to the upper floor in the center, why stairs, and they had an office up there, which took care of all of our heaters is taken in our follies went up to the office that eventually they decided me to go into the cash and carry as it was slotless. No, it was a cage built in the middle of this grocery department. And one of the local girls sat there is wrapping up the car. From there, everything is always together was never the same store. The Trading Company was equally as interesting there, they had letters on wheels. And everything bought there was over the counter. And the people who are serving you ran up and down these ladders. Usually what you wanted was at the top shelf and don't want to reach past the bottom. This is a painting company. They slept on the counters, everybody loves them. There were barrels of dips and barrels of that too. Nobody gets eaten, you could put your hand in the past itself, the coconut or whatever. It was a very easy going friendly place where everyone left every one of them everyone knew each other. Which of course is no longer the case.

Unknown Speaker 42:23
So our last caption is an interview done by Mary Williamson in on November 7 1977, and she's interviewing Donald Goodman who's talking about Mr. Bullock.

Unknown Speaker 42:57
Of course, that was my favorite one. Well, if we lost it here forgiven. Okay, you think it's gone? Well, that's already three is good. And they're just fascinating. But oh, this shows that over the years, many people have volunteered many hours to keep memories alive. And so many of you are on the internet. So you can just go into the website and look in the audio files. And like I say there are almost 100 Now no,

Unknown Speaker 43:40
no, okay. All right. Thanks. Thank

Unknown Speaker 43:44
you, Frank. They were wonderful the three we did here. So now you have experienced a brief introduction to the Saltspring Archives website. And here the rich heritage of Saltspring has been carefully organized and displayed so that it's easy, easily accessible to all on the internet. So we are keenly interested in old photographs and documents which tell the history of Saltspring. And yes, we have recording devices and we'd be delighted to arrange an interview. If you or someone you know has has a story to tell themselves from history. I'll now introduce spark 2 million, who in addition to being the Historical Society secretary is one of our archives volunteers. She will take questions and wrap up our presentation.

Unknown Speaker 44:42
Actually, I wrote two pages, but everything has been covered. So I'm off the hook. We originally got together and I just want to mention that the person behind organizing all of us unfortunately wasn't able to come that's Roberta Stark and I just like to acknowledge all the work that she went in and getting this going, because we thought it would be an ideal time for us to, we're so busy asking other people to do presentations, and we thought maybe we should be looking at what we do ourselves and making it more familiar to, to everyone just in case you haven't taken a trip to the, to the library to visitors downstairs, we haven't been online yet, we hope that this won't encourage you to do so. So, my thanks to Mary for introducing all of us and to sue for providing us with the history and acknowledge that we are 25. Today to bar for telling us all about what an archive is. Exactly. And so now we know we don't just, you know, donate things, we donate letters, bills, whatever that's written, to the archives, and to Charles, and Sue, again for how researchers use it. And of course, to Frank and Susan, for telling us how to access it through the web. The nice thing being there that we can't, you know, harm any of the original documents. By the way, you come in to the archives, you get to wear white gloves. Anyway, at this point, I think maybe some of you might want to have questions, and perhaps isn't was person in there, I might not be able to answer them. But I'm sure a lot of people could. So do we have any questions? Ruth, could you explain what vertical files are? Vertical files?

Unknown Speaker 46:37
I think Barb is probably the best. Mary, do you want to do this? All right, good.

Unknown Speaker 46:51
A vertical file is you take a file folder and put in whatever it is that has been donated, or we've acquired from someplace, and you put it in alphabetical order in a filing cabinet. It's a very simple process. And you would find, I'm not sure if they have one in the library. But fall archives and many visors, have them I was a school librarian before you can something called an archivist. And I had a eight vertical file. It's where you can find information. And it's easy to find because it's an alphabetical order. We have two actually three vertical files. One is devoted to people. And that's two drawers, long drawers. Two is devoted to other things, including the history of salt, spring clippings, largely flora and fauna. Anything to do with any of the organizations on Saltspring transportation, BC Ferries, just a variety of titles. Then we have a vertical file for pictures of people, families, anything to do with individuals. And the other one is things like places. Anything we have a picture up there. There are about six envelopes again to use. For it. They're so full I have to keep putting them into new envelopes. Because so it just it ruins the envelope and there's too much and there's one on my hospital of course, BC Ferries all the all the areas of Salisbury because up is about point in every everything that comes in and doesn't log in another file gets in for itself. So a vertical file is very useful. Very handy.

Unknown Speaker 49:27
Yes, the audio files available online. Yes. And for some of them, there are transcripts as well.

Unknown Speaker 49:37
They just have a look at the title page. You can go into our collections. You have a list of the photographs down at the left and there is me audio files and you click on that there's a whole list of them. Some of them are actually not excellent Quality. You can hear most of them, I believe, much older ones, sometimes a lot of interference, which you'd almost expect from a really old recording. But they're still really interesting to listen to. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 50:19
Superb iPads, I just think it's wonderful, like integrated. Online, I've had the privilege to come here, to the physical facilities, I think it's great, especially if a person of African descent that you have documented here the rich, you know, multicultural heritage of this island in one place, I think it's fabulous. And I'd like to know what are the protocols, the procedures and the fees in need to go green fencing, some of the archival photos you're hearing

Unknown Speaker 50:58
we have a fee for pictures, and very important pictures, if they're going to use some for any kind of commercial use. If it's a family, then we usually just email a high resolution copy of the picture to the person, or if they don't have the computer where they want it to go. And you can run them off yourselves. Frank books after all of that sort of thing to do with pictures. If it's a document of some sort, it can be scanned and done the same way. We tend to be very, very partial to our people. We have people from publishing companies who want pictures or publications, they are charged. And we have a fee schedule that's also been in the archives. Did I answer everything in anything?

Unknown Speaker 52:18
Are there any other questions?

Unknown Speaker 52:22
Or comments you've heard over the years about these grants the archives gets. And the audio files is a typical one a couple of years ago, we got a very nice grant to assist this foot by the equipment to convert the old eight tracks or whatever they were into computer and do all the organization work. So and again, the one we're working on now Jerry K Barber, one. And that too, is used for getting this material onto the website. And I think the archives as a group is to be congratulated because the first thing anybody looking at a grant application would do is look at the website, what are these people doing? And obviously the success just a snowball, I'm wearing my library hat for a moment. The library is very interested in maintaining partnership with the archives. All of the library planning does involve a sizable room for the archives. And they're involved in the design of that.

Unknown Speaker 53:21
There's one more thing to mention, too, that the if you want information, they have an email address, which you can contact them through your computer as well. So it's a I think it's called info Saltspring archives. So you've said it's an interactive email off that website. You can go back

Unknown Speaker 53:43
further to what Bob has said. If you email info@sulfer.com, the the email goes to all of us. And that includes other people that have been involved in this. And everybody gets a chance to answer not some of us know a lot more about Salzburg and others, as you will see knows a great deal. Boucher knows a great deal. I'm quite limited to the south end, because when we started the archives, Haiti was north end, but it was something because of our various family connections. I don't really know a lot about them or family, whatever is selected in the archives. But it's it's very important that this question goes to everybody. Because surely there will be one of us that will be able to answer or at least know how to find the episode

Unknown Speaker 54:49
should just mention that through the website. One of our family members who lives in England contacted the family we'd never met her before and she came to To sell spring and Galliano and paid a visit so it was through the website that she found us

Unknown Speaker 55:13
there any other questions that somebody has well we just

Unknown Speaker 55:18
well thanks very much and very informative and very useful and I hope any of you that are interested will go to the website you can see the defendants amount of work that all these people put into this twice a week they meet and get together and work on it Frank credit for a lot of the work that a lot of the other work is done by the volunteers who implement the ideas and cataloging record and everything so on behalf of all of us thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

Unknown Speaker 56:20
I didn't bother writing mine is all covered it mine was pretty well yeah

Unknown Speaker 56:26
yeah

Unknown Speaker 56:49
right

Unknown Speaker 56:56
oh let's see recorder

Unknown Speaker 57:04
Bernie glasses to us Yeah, it can just yank the stuff out

Unknown Speaker 57:21
close the lid or something doesn't matter. You can just leave it open Menza doesn't even open and running for better. We could pull all the plugs out

Unknown Speaker 57:42
I know