This post is in celebration of Archives Month 2025. American Archives Month is celebrated every October and is meant as a time for archivists to advocate for themselves, their profession, and for the importance of historical records and documentation as a mechanism of organization, shared history, and accountability.
When we give special tours to visitors, we will sometimes pull out a few special items from the collections that we think will impress them. When other archivists visit, it becomes harder to impress. We could pull out, say, a Christmas card from Teddy Roosevelt, but they would respond with something like, “So what, we all have something like this.”
Something that we can pull out to impress are Sister Elaine Wheeler’s notebooks.
In 1978, Sister Elaine was temporarily on mission in St. Louis, taking a course on Spirituality and Scripture Study, when she received a call from Sister Mary Basil Roarke, Visitatrix of the former Northeast Province at the time. Sister Mary Basil asked her to “spend six months to a year setting up the archives for the Northeast Province [her home province in Albany, NY]?” As a Daughter of Charity does, Sister Elaine accepted the ministry and then apparently said to herself, “You idiot, you don’t know a thing about archives.”
But, taking Sister Mary Basil’s advice to visit archives and take some workshops, she called upon her oldest sister, Sister Mary Cecelia Wheeler, archivist for the Religious Sisters of the Sacred Heart, conveniently also located in St. Louis. Sister Mary Cecelia gave Sister Elaine her first lesson on archives, a lesson that Sister Elaine would pass on to many others – that there is the theoretical and the perfect in the archives, which is something to attain to, and that there is the practical and the real.
By Sister Elaine’s tally, she visited 17 repositories, took 16 workshops, and attended the Society of American Archivists conference 21 times over her 26 years as Archivist. Her notebooks document not only her research, but a chapter of archival history in the late 1970s and early 1980s when communities of women religious began to establish formal archives for their communities and for outsiders.
At the time, there were five provinces of the Daughters of Charity in the United States. Not only did Sister Elaine help establish the archive for her home province, but she also worked with the other four provinces (the Southeast in Emmitsburg, MD; the East Central in Evansville, IN; the West Central in St. Louis, MO; and the West in Los Altos, CA) to help set up their own archives, establishing cataloging guidelines and starting an oral history project for sisters in the Northeast. The archives of the different provinces met routinely for many years. Her work continues to exert influence on us here in Emmitsburg every single day!
In addition to the Daughters’ collections, Sister Elaine took what she learned and applied it elsewhere. She traveled to different hospitals under the Daughters’ orbit – usually the ministries that created the largest amounts of records – and provided workshops to ensure that the hospitals themselves were keeping records accurately to better administer patient care.
The reason that these notebooks remain a fascination to other archivists is because they reflect the same training that we all went through. Sister Elaine learned about what an archival facility ideally would look like, how to determine what to accession and add to the collections, the importance of weeding collections to preserve space, and the necessity of good policies and procedures to ensure privacy where appropriate and yet still make the materials available. Certainly, Sister Elaine’s training was a little less dependent on computer systems than ours today, but we still see the makings of all of our mentors and mentees in the field, and can see the place of Sisters going forth into the world reflected in the ministry of the Archives!
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