InsightOut: SOS Archival Work Brings Alumna M.C. Havey Full Circle

M.C. Havey (SMC 71) graduated with a history degree from the University of Toronto and worked as a news reporter for two Ontario newspapers and The Canadian Press, always on the lookout for the human interest angle in news stories. After a graduate degree in history from the University of Waterloo in 1984, she has worked in archives ever since, initially for the Archives of Ontario. The mutual archivist for the Sisters of Service and the Congregation of the Holy Redeemer (the Redemptorists), M.C. is the recipient of the Alexander Fraser Award from the Archives Association of Ontario, the Francis X Seelos Award from the Institute for the Redemptorist Historical Studies, North America, and the Edward Jackman Award from the Canadian Catholic Historical Association.

I have come full circle in my connection with the John M. Kelly Library. Just after opening in 1969, the library became my undergraduate home as a history student. I read, researched and wrote papers on topics in Canadian, British and American history on the second floor in a row of study carrels along the southern windows overlooking St. Joseph’s College School. The bright interior décor and spaciousness with comfortable seating were conducive to focused long hours to meet deadlines of course readings, papers or exams.

More than five decades later, the area of the second floor carrels now houses the library’s Special Collections, where is located my proudest professional achievement of completing the archives of the religious Institute of the Sisters of Service (SOS) for its donation to the library.

Glimpses of the plucky Sisters are highlighted in the 150-item exhibit: The Big Maps, The Sisters of Service as Canadian Trailblazers, which opens on October 23 at the Kelly Library’s ground level exhibit area. Last year, the 500 boxes of SOS archival records were transferred to the library and contain the documents and images of this untraditional, unique women’s missionary community for Canadians, especially immigrants, from the Toronto founding in 1922 and to the present.

The SOS were a far cry from the sisters who had taught me in separate school and high school. Instead of religious habits, convents and strict rules, the SOS wore simple grey uniforms, stylish capes and hats, and kept their Christian and surnames, all of which broke invisible interpersonal barriers. Living under flexible rules in humble dwellings among the people, they taught in one-room schoolhouses and nursed in their central Alberta hospitals. In spreading and maintaining the faith in rural Canada, the SOS set up religious correspondence schools in Edmonton (1926) and Regina (1934) and mailed catechetical lessons, often accompanied by colouring games, to thousands of students in the winter, many of whom the Sisters met on their summer tours to teach catechism and to prepare the students for First Communion/Confirmation. These quietly competent and confident women were mature, resilient, gritty and innovative, adjusting to their circumstances, whether by driving cars in the late 1920s or accepting government professional positions in the Canadian North in the 1970s.

Over a period of 28 years in the SOS archives, my knowledge and admiration grew when tackling the archival organization and file listing, and later in writing and researching their history for requests, papers at conferences and mounting an archives website. When I began in the SOS archives, more than half of the 124 Sisters were living. My sense of the individual Sisters’ personalities and events emerged initially from the details of their typed or handwritten correspondence and reports, and from articles in their quarterly magazine, The Field at Home. It also came from reading anecdotes of mishaps, joys, changes and fun in the annals, the daily journal of each of the 60 Canadian missions. That sense of familiarity deepened with informal, casual chats with Sisters, who stopped at the archives’ open door, and related cherished anecdotes of people and missions. For eight years, Sister Viola Mossey, who stands in a prairie wheatfield on the left side in the exhibit’s iconic photograph, helped in the archives. Sister Vi reminisced, often with laughter, about family, friends, the SOS, and her missions, especially in the women’s residence, the deaf ministry and parishes. She was a priceless identifier of Sisters, events and locations in photographs.

The 20,000 photographic images taken by, or for the Sisters are the gem of the archives. Hours of listing details of almost each photograph, which were placed on a database, will provide future Kelly Library archivists with easy retrieval of the historically important photographs; images in the 150 albums and 5,000 photographs in individual envelopes with specific information. I still pause in amazement of the effect these photographs in documenting the changes across the country. In an album of the teaching mission in Sinnett, Saskatchewan, Sisters’ photos capture the farming, school and community life of a village that no longer exists and now is recognized solely by a historical plaque. For the exhibit, Kelly Library Archivist Francesca Rousselle selected some favourite photographs. The startling image evokes a smile of founder Catherine Donnelly, spirited at age 50, swinging an axe to clear a rural Cariboo Road in British Columbia during a two-month tour to teach catechism to the ranchers’ children. No doubt, determination was summoned with every swing.

Together, the photos and the printed records also captured Canada grappling with the Depression, prairie drought, wartime rations, postwar immigration and its subsequent boom. In mission correspondence, Sisters note area development through government programs of road construction, the closing of small schools and hospitals in favour of large regional schools and hospitals. I was amazed, specifically, at their detailed accounts and statistics in their reports of meeting and assisting Catholics disembarking from European ships at Halifax’s Pier 21, Quebec City, Montreal and Saint John, NB.

The 1960s were a turning point for the SOS. The original missions of teaching in one-room schoolhouses, small hospitals, women’s residences, and religious education were either closed or adjusted according to societal changes and the renewal of religious life from the Second Vatican Council. Sisters took the opportunity of switching professional careers to meet the people in current need after graduating from universities and technical courses. Further ground-breaking paths lay in the number of Sisters from the late 1960s until the 1990s. Besides Sisters employed in social work and public health, others mounted early childhood education, and university courses for prospective indigenous teachers. Their pastoral care broadened as parish religious educators, administrators and assistants as well as chaplains and nurses in psychiatric and general hospitals, or as the first women chaplain in federal prisons. The walls of the Toronto Motherhouse were covered with plaques of gratitude to individual sisters, and the community for their dedicated service. The SOS financial and spiritual legacy continues to extend the charism and mission with the creation of the Catherine Donnelly Foundation in 2003 to assist nonprofit organizations.

As an archivist, my fretting over the final archives’ location has ended. The archival records as the SOS historical legacy now are part a growing research centre on the second floor of the Kelly Library, nearby where I began my study and appreciation of history. Full circle!

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