This will be in two parts; the first will provide background, the second, #6b, later, will describe the project.
People write letters. No, modify that: some people write letters - and these days emails. Some people save the letters they receive. If they save the letters long enough, those letters become of great interest to their descendants, because they capture the daily life of generations past.
My early years were spent at Valley Springs Ranch in the Great Bend Municipality of Saskatchewan, in the elbow of the North Saskatchewan River northwest of Saskatoon. My father's people - English Quakers who arrived in 1912 - homesteaded there, and in time finding the riverbank and the stony plateau above the river unsuitable for grain-growing, raised cattle instead. Five Quaker families came to the district in the early years of the last century, and while they were not kin then, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now all connected...
Each of those families, my grandparents' family included, left close family behind them in England. During the following fifty years, letters went back and forth regularly between England and Valley Springs Ranch, and also between my grandparents and those of their children who lived at a distance.
Some of those letters were saved at Valley Springs Ranch. Why some and not others? Because the letters were passed from hand to hand in the Quaker community, and there did not seem to be the expectation that they would always be returned.
When the time came for the last of my grandparents' children to retire and leave Valley Springs Ranch, the decision was made to donate the letters, along with photographs, documents, diaries and memorabilia, to the Saskatchewan Archives Board. This was the early 1980s, and at that time no one in the younger generation - MY generation - had expressed an interest in this material, consequently it seemed to my aunts to be a good move to do this.
And a good move it was. The Hinde Fond of the Saskatchewan Archives Board, now housed in the main SAB location in Regina, is set up to document, preserve and make accessible all archival material. We know this from visiting the SAB Saskatoon, and being required to get a researcher's pass, and they wear white gloves to handle the material...
Several years ago my sister and I started arranging for copies of pictures and paper materials to be copied. Among these were the letters to the Ranch, and when they finally were given attention, they cried out to be made into a book. That book, Letters to the Ranch, is close to being ready to print and bind, and it is hoped it will be dated 2008.
Status: It's on the front burner. Mary took the draft for final proofreading yesterday.