Grace\u2019s letters are just one bundle of documents, all\nwritten out in cursive hand, that are now being transcribed by the Aurora\nMuseum & Archives and more than 200 community volunteers who responded to\nthe Museum\u2019s call just a few short weeks ago during this time of physical and\nsocial distancing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEvery time we open one of our hundreds of archival\nboxes, we find documents written in cursive,\u201d says Michelle Johnson of the\nAurora Museum & Archives. \u201cWe\u2019re very lucky as everyone at the Museum can\nread cursive, but we understand that is becoming a harder skill to find. It is\nnot being taught anymore in public schools and the reality is that before we\ncan get our collection online, documents need to be transcribed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe see these documents all the time and we had an idea\nto put a call out because we could use a lot of help transcribing. It is an\nincredible amount of work and we know there are people who have quite a bit of\ndowntime right now and were looking for something to do to take their kind off\nour current situation and just keep busy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To say that the community answered the call might be\nsomething of an understatement. By the end of last week, the Aurora Museum\n& Archives had amassed 215 volunteers who were actively engaging with\ndocuments sent to them digitally by the Museum with a further 110 patientvolunteers\non a waiting list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople have been able to get involved as much as they\nlike,\u201d says Ms. Johnson. \u201cSome people had a lot of experience doing\ngenealogical research, so along with the transcription, they would send back\nreally detailed, incredible notes about the writer, about the person it was\nwritten to, things they could find through different websites doing historical\nbackground research on the personalities in the letter, and sometimes on the\ncontent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grace\u2019s eventual husband, for instance, was a student at\nQueen\u2019s University and one of the transcribers who received a portion of\nGrace\u2019s correspondence shared an alma-mater with the letter-writer. Another\nvolunteer who was assigned letters received by former mayor J.M. Walton from an\nacquaintance in Pennsylvania found they grew up just a stone\u2019s throw from where\nthe letters were originally sent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy favourite items in the archives are the letters and\ncorrespondence,\u201d says Ms. Johnson. \u201cIt harkens back to a time when receiving a\nletter through the mail meant a lot more than it does now. People are used to\ngetting emails; I don\u2019t know how many people still receive hand-written letters\nanymore, and it was a way to stay connected. I think the parallels of using\nletter-writing to stay connected throughout history and trying to find an\nactivity to connect people today really spoke for themselves. The\ncorrespondence, the different letters in the archives, are what we call our\n\u2018rabbit holes\u2019 in that whenever we open up a box and begin to look through it,\nit is hard to stop yourself from reading he letters in their entirety. You get\nlost in it and it is really quite compelling to sit and read some of them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although the current quota of letters is currently spoken\nfor, if you would like to sit down with a letter and read some of them for\nyourself, you are invited to join the Aurora Museum & Archives\u2019 waiting\nlist for documents to transcribe once they are digitized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are incredibly grateful and very fortunate to have\nthis many people who wanted to donate their time to a project like this,\u201d says\nMs. Johnson. \u201cThis is really a large part of the back-of-house work that goes\ninto getting a collection online and making archives accessible. To have a\nlarge team like this is absolutely incredible and while we\u2019re out of our space\nat 22 Church Street for Library Square construction, we will be turning our\nfocus to this kind of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile we have temporarily depleted our digitized\ndocuments, once we are back up and running, that whole scanning process will\nresume, we\u2019ll be able to replenish our stock and get letters out to the\ncommunity to continue transcribing. Additionally, if you speak a language other\nthan English, you are more than welcome to translate the contents of the letter\ninto another language. For us, that is a really incredible aspect as it makes\nthe material accessible in terms of language diversity. Once our archive goes\nonline, it can be searched by anybody anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more information, contact Michelle Johnson of the Aurora Museum & Archives at mjohnson@aurora.ca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n Grace might have been rather sentimental. As the decades passed, she kept just about every letter written to her when she and her boyfriend were apart, and she continued to do so well after her boyfriend became her husband. Carefully stored and packed away more than a century on, these letters are now being seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-6UI","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 00:53:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/48x48\/facebook.png\" "\\"Share")
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