Salt Spring Island Archives
| Accession Number | |||
| Date | 2015 | ||
| Media | digital recording | Audio | mp3 √ |
| duration | 28 min. |
365_Adiel-Pantoja_The-Bion-File_2015.mp3
otter.ai
17.02.2024
no
Outline
Unknown Speaker 0:14
This is the house they had on the island
Unknown Speaker 0:24
get these letters in boxes, and plastic boxes underneath the conservative well. And as far as it was, once they are there, they stay forever there because we take scans. And that's what we we we work with the vendors themselves. Or we say within these plastic sheets, here is a good example. The number here is a number of the letter. And sometimes they include a label with stamps. And then all those post office sounds are given sometimes a very good clue when it was sent. By the same time I have a spreadsheet in Excel, that is Christ, first of all, the number of the document, who is from who is to read into, and I have five or six colors, where describe what is the content. So you don't have to translate the letters completely. And that's that's a victory. Because sometimes he writes from the from the trenches in war. Imagine the conditions, his writing is bad. And even in those conditions even worse, sometimes it's very hard to understand the text.
Unknown Speaker 1:57
Is it because of the quality? Or is it because of the nature narrative?
Unknown Speaker 2:05
The Calligraphy is I have some from my father, who is in the trenches and not too bad with what you like my mother tongue is Spanish. I am from Chile, actually. I love freshing in Montreal, where are you 20 years. And one of the main reasons for joining the Congress as a volunteer was to get my French, French and learn more. which I enjoy. And I'm really happy about it. Here is a biblical letter from Paul. And as you can see, it's not easy to understand. It's not easy to understand his wife on the other side she was in the house and her writing was much better. My best calligraphy was from poor Bill's father. He was writing to them from from France. And it was really easy to read those. Here's an example of a letter that is written very I mean, lots of information in a piece of paper and there is blurry rarely sites, which are very difficult to understand. So we can spend hours on whether there are many postcards and send especially from Poland, France and also the states you have to travel to the states did he become an expert became an expert. He went to teach the Americans how they will pay us fight in case the Americans had to Jonathan and Paul among other things, he was a photographer permit us to fly and take picture from the air and use use many of those pictures to teach the Americas how the Europeans fight with this a night this is the father of all called pF and his record as you can see is much much friendly and he always put the process of the letter the HS eight very clear no problem. Other letters are really really problematic and I have to borrow the magnifying glass and this is in relation to do your wife and their only son Yeah. This is Paul beyond with his son in the trenches is what it is very interesting to read some of his experiences in the trenches where they cannot understand his writing. and he's telling his wife what he's going through. is amazing. Another one, sometimes they want to who am I to read this private lurkers between husband and wife? Sometimes they get very personal, and they feel nervous. reading your stuff. But I don't share it much with anybody. It's like space there. This is one of the I already have pictures. My poor beyond, oh, the Christ army, which shows some men on the left hand side are men and the sunset is his side are horses. With the riders that you see an airplane, please in another way. By the way, there must be over oneself and pictures in the collection that I haven't seen yet. I have no idea what to do. I may recognize 20% of what is in there the rest. I don't know. He was a man of many gifts. He received many certificates of honor. And the Warcross he was an electrical engineer. He was a photographer, area photographer too. He was an expert in patience. Korea patience. He became an expert in chicken when he came here to the to the island, they open it with chicken farm. And the salt cell. They're sold the eggs and the meat. He spoke five languages fluently. He was going to man and he lived 63 years until he died in 1937. And the coalition not only has it there because they're finally writing to each other and paperwork after his death. So on that part now working together on that part of the collection.
Unknown Speaker 7:30
Did he stay on the island? Yes, the whole time? Was it the French army? They go back to fight with the French army?
Unknown Speaker 7:40
Yeah, he does. I didn't show you that. I did a first world war display for the Legion. And he was one of my people. What he did was he was in the French army for many years before he became an engineer. And he has no idea what I had in the working away surrounded by his papers for three years now. Yeah, so he was he was he was the reserve in the reserve. And so he came over here had been here, two or three years had his first son at the age of 40. And he was the first man to go to the First World War because he was called out again, he had he was an actual officer in the French army. And as he wasn't a full officer, but a reserve officer, he wasn't expected to do very much. He kept getting honor after honor. He kept being promoted. And get it you know, he was a very able person yet. Here on the island was his wife, with her two nieces her her sister died. So she hit me up to two next is managing the new farm all by herself with a new baby. And he's there in France writing out one of the quotes that I do it says, Oh, it's fine. I'm going to the to the front today, but I shouldn't be behind it. I should be perfectly safe. He got wounded that year in twice. Amazing. Sort of, he survived, which is a really good thing. So yeah, so I'm gonna, with time is getting on and we knew this might happen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to we're going to talk about the next bit, which is how we go out into the public and share when I'm going to do a Should we do it anyway? Yeah, we're going to do a an online search for you just to show you how the website is just give you a little tour of the website. So sharing with the public on our website, and the community events. So we can sort of whip through this. What this means is I've dropped the last topic, which is research. So pity this research support, that's one of our tasks, and I was going to end up and I was going to mention your case. I was gonna I was gonna go all the way through and say and we deal with individuals with very unusual questions, and some of them are about ghosts on their property. And that's your situation, but I won't get there today. I'm sorry. So But we will I think it's important to show everybody, our website, and how we try and share this, too, because there's a lot of stuff going on in the archives. But we do try and share things. So we're gonna go on the internet, or shall we just show instruments? We've got to either going on the internet or you can do it on
Unknown Speaker 10:32
my son when he was a baby, excuse me not. Okay, you want me to do this? What comes up when you close down the thing? It's all my photos. So that was my son as a baby.
Unknown Speaker 10:53
So is this actually on the internet? Yeah, it is. Okay, so oops, sorry. That's me. Yeah, so this is us on the internet. And so what we so this is me using Mac? Yes. So what you do is, this is WWW dot Saltspring archives.com. Put that into the internet. And you come up with our front page here. And most of what we have is in our collections, which is here. And there are 149 topics there. Now, I wanted to know from Frank, how many prank has single handedly built this website? How many images do you think you've got on here? We stopped counting at 30,000. Was it? Why? Because what about each page of the driftwood from 1960 to not 2000? Do we count that as a single image? Now, let me contrast this with I went into Clay County, Missouri, a municipally funded archive to look for the stocks photos of the stocks, owners, slave owners, you know who stocks I hope they were slaves who came up here and we're on Stark road. They had in this municipally funded archives 300 photographs, none of which helped me to find the slave owners. Having 330 1000 photo images, all of them scanned and put on here by Frank is just an amazing resources. Totally amazing. Yes. Thank you. I was recognition. Yeah, it really is. It's, it's, it's a wonderful what he wants to leave you wants to leave at this point. So what you can do is give me a family name, please form Saltspring an old family name. Okay, a k, e r, M A. And then you just press search. Now, so I shouldn't go any further from where you can click on each one of these and see something about the a Cummins. Now notice I'm scrolling up, Robert, Joe. And notice at the bottom here, we've got all these pages, these go on forever. These some of these will be photographs and collections. Some of them will be for example, probably in the later ones. There'll be some stuff in the driftwood even see what we get. You can see from the thing here, we've got a Cummins in different collections. The Aikman museum here, and so on. And it just goes on and on. This is all our own website material that we're searching here. Yeah. You can't go past page 10 all the way there is a way you want to you want to go to a speech. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. Here we getting here we get into the graves. Here you can see Yeah, I I've never actually wanted to go plus page 10. But but apparently there is a way ask Frank. I have no idea. So what as well as as well as just going back now to the to the collections page, as well as the name index here. Which was about 130 names. We've got these topics here. And, for example, the Gulf Island driftwood has been is being scanned. And I'll just show you the front of it here. So that's that's where you can click on each one of these. I'm not going to do it because they take a while to download, but 1960 March the 24th for example. You can go and look up what was happening, incredible resource for historians. And then we've got population records, the census information, birth, births, deaths, some of that's incomplete, but we've got all the census information there. Cemetery records, maps maps are wonderful. She showed the cemetery. Yeah. So this is a project that I'm working on as well, with our we're aiming to document, we've got some documentation of all the graveyards. But now what we're getting is all the records from the churches. And from the hope from the municipality, we haven't actually gotten their agreement yet. And we're going from that direction. So it will be a much more complete representation. So here we've got some marks cemetery. We've got all the people from A to K in the in the south section. And here's a photo of the grave and what it says on the grave. And you can actually see that that's virtually not readable. However, we've still we've got it there. So some of this is fading fast on the gravestones themselves. Oh, nope. Sorry. It's me doing this again. Sorry. Close window. Okay. Oh, you're right. It's close windows. Back. Yeah. So yeah. So that's, that's basically there is a massive resource here of material. Now, I don't want to
Unknown Speaker 16:13
say how many hours
Unknown Speaker 16:17
probably full time. Yeah, absolutely perfectly full time, in bits. A lot of this work we can do at home, for example, I sit and watch tennis tournaments, and transcribe Alex zaken. By the way, I never told you one of the reasons I love Aleksei can because, let alone this friendship with the Chinese. He ended up the reef or the mayor of North Cowichan for six terms. So he went from being a shepherd, he obviously had some education, you can see right through it, but to being and he was the vice president of the BC woolgrowers association. So this was a man of character, a man of achievement. And so this is where I fall in love with these people is they are they have resilience, they used to be a psychologist, they really do have resilient personalities. It's like you put them somewhere and they survive. They don't just survive, they make your life for themselves. And I think that's a common characteristic. So, do we want to do anything more? Let me just show.
Unknown Speaker 17:43
You okay, these are the these are the slides that we're going to show go past. If we couldn't get on the internet, we're going to show the slides so you can get an idea. They don't just copy just past leads to the next bit. So what I just wanted to end with showing you was our taking our wares out into the community. This is our displays at the old timers reunion in 2012. This is Frank with the newspaper hat on at the driftwood anniversary. This is the Legion display from last year, which we are going to recreate this year. That's the section on poor beyond. You can see there. This is a Roku Farm Day with George laundry sitting there. And this is the BCS Leftenant Governor visiting the library in the archives looking at some of our displays. And that's why we're going to end just because of timing. But it seems to me that it for me. What what what we were going to talk about was research support. And I think that's an important part of what all archives do is they're there for the public. But we're also there for institutions. So the farmers Institute, for example comes to see Frank to find out for their 100 family history. You know exactly what was the first day of the first fall fair. You know, we found that a very difficult as you didn't and but also in terms of institutional help. Frank and I have been to and Brian Smallshaw Some of you may know him. The UVic is involved in a project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council about it's called Asian Canadians on Vancouver Island, and specifically for Saltspring Brian Smallshaw is writing a thesis and doing research on Japanese internment and dispossession of properties. And he's going to give a talk in the spring about his research, which will be wonderful. So we're trying to contribute without some of our documentation to that institution. But let's say the mainstay of what we do is for people on Saltspring, and families and individuals who ask us about the relatives, and who we talk to about their relatives. And just to give you the one example, Can I use your example? This is why I love your house. So we get somebody who comes in and tells us that she's moved to a property where she keeps seeing a ghost. And can we help you to identify the ghost? And we think we did. We didn't think I was crazy. No, we didn't think she was crazy people, people's egos. And we so we showed photos from that era from from that area, and possibly we identified a ghost. The other ghost I wanted to mention, which is my favorite ghosts, perhaps yours is
Unknown Speaker 20:57
three, Frank was just wonderful in just me describing word properties and what I was seeing. He just zero right in to this lady and I recognized her by a photo.
Unknown Speaker 21:17
Well, that's, that's, that's another time. The other one that wanted to tell you about was the young man who came in, they just bought a property on Robins road, and he wants to know who owned it because his wife kept being goosed. Now, this is our boosting jobs we never discovered. And this is why, you know, archiving is dry and dull, but it's not done. Okay, thank you.
Unknown Speaker 21:51
A long time to go there. So
Unknown Speaker 22:05
just before you go, I'd like to thank everybody, especially those presenters today, Julian, who put programming together and the rest of you, thank you very much. It really does show us what the Archives does. And I think we always think of an archives is a little dusty hole was somebody in a little half metal pair in Lhasa sitting on a high bench and a darkened room looking through old manuscripts. And these people are preserving our history. And we really appreciate it. Thank you very much. As a reminder that our next meeting will be in salt predominately on November the kids. And it will be the 75th anniversary of the school. And the program, of course will be based on the history of the school. And the other thing, as I mentioned that we are starting our fundraising campaign this month for is called the Legacy Fund, which is the money is deemed to preserve the history of the archives and substrate, we do have a high rent charge of the library and we have to pay that but it is also for other things in the general preservation of art history. So if you remember, little spot in your charitable donation is remember the archives, as somebody mentioned, a donation in the library does not benefit the archives. So I hope you'll keep us in mind. Thanks very much for coming this afternoon. And we'll see you again bye timeless we don't need
Unknown Speaker 23:41
the return on rating here but it's I think it's two o'clock on all the time so what was your question then? q&a
Unknown Speaker 23:58
This document was leaked out
Unknown Speaker 24:08
to the senate house yes. Yes, I worked
Unknown Speaker 24:19
with some of the
Unknown Speaker 24:33
Yes, that's right. Except the the artifacts that beyond artifacts which is likely to try and convince their museum now. Some of those photographs were in the military museum when they gave them up. This is when you say valuable this is it. They didn't sell them that might have there is somebody trying to sell somebody on the other video material, but I don't think he's having any success. What which one too The chandeliers oh really the kind of mid surface of that it was
Unknown Speaker 25:08
wonderful to recall all
Unknown Speaker 25:14
the kids out there
Unknown Speaker 25:25
you ever
Unknown Speaker 25:37
wondered name
Unknown Speaker 25:52
again depending
Unknown Speaker 26:13
on right
Unknown Speaker 26:24
yeah
Unknown Speaker 26:31
good morning family
Unknown Speaker 26:46
we are no Scotch know what
Unknown Speaker 27:22
that's all right right sorry yes that's right you can even know that you're in the we still got some taping
Unknown Speaker 27:45
get it off now this just stays there a long time because you used I was famous at the lab for issuing a memorandum the duct tape was not to be used underground because somehow in the in the atmosphere of the mind turn router in about two months might have been a software error or something but you're allowed to use it for temporary fixes anything permanent or do you want to do this
Unknown Speaker 28:21
so I'm putting that adapter right in here okay
Unknown Speaker 28:23
a lot of pressure
Unknown Speaker 28:44
know
Unknown Speaker 28:49
unfortunately
Unknown Speaker 28:50
you
