The Home Archivist is a series of articles in which professional historian Jessica Dunkin discusses her experiences with a private collection of 19th-century letters.
Professional historian Jessica Dunkin has written the first article in a series, called The Home Archivist, where she shares her experience with a private collection of 19th-century letters she received this summer. When she (temporarily) received the carton of letters, she was both “thrilled and terrified.” Many of the letters were damaged following a number of moves and a long life in attics and basements. They had even survived a fire.
Ms. Dunkin writes: “Having completed an MA and PhD in History, I am comfortable working with archival materials, but I know next to nothing about how they are processed. How does one open a bundle of letters bound together by time, smoke, and mold? I have decided to take this opportunity to learn more about the journey that some historical documents make from attic to accession number, to dispel some of the mystery I feel around archival practices. In addition to processing, I’m curious about the decisions that are made in the organization of archival collections.”
Since Ms. Dunkin is not a professional archivist, she has decided to share the amateur steps she is taking to process and organize the letters.
This series should be especially interesting to genealogists, many of whom own old collections and heirlooms that we should better preserve.
Ms. Dunkin is an SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Read about the letters in her first article in The Home Archivist on ActiveHistory.ca.
