I’m Jessica Schmidt. I’m a fourth year Honours English student, set to graduate this semester. I am very, very ready to graduate, but despite my excitement to no longer be an undergraduate I am also very pleased to have a chance to do some research in the archives before I leave UBC’s hallowed halls. My focus of study has been a bit sporadic throughout my degree, but my favourite courses have been in Modernism and post-war writing. The shortlist of my favourite fields of study are similarly all over the place: Virginia Woolf holds a special place in my heart, but so do fairy tales, from origin in oral tradition to Disney (that’s actually what my Honours thesis is about), and I also have a special interest in epistolary form writing such as Pamela/Shamela, but also letters themselves as historical nonfiction.

What drew me to this course initially was the idea of how an archive is assembled – what is important enough to be archived, but also who determines “importance”, and how that process is undertaken. Most of my experience with archives is family tree research that I’ve undertaken with my aunt. My family has been in Canada for 11 generations, so going through some of the records to assemble the “Canadian” side of the tree was quite a long process. Not much of that research was in physical archives; most of the information was gathered digitally and virtually, excepting a trip to Quebec City to visit churches and such. While exploring my family tree was also of mostly a personal interest for myself, there were some things that I learnt about my family which made me think about my family’s history in a broader scope than just my relation to them. For instance, the family name that I am a most consistent descendent from is Beaupre, but that spelling was never consistent. At one point we had a list on file with over ten different spellings of the name Beaupre, varying from very phonetic, such as Bopray, to some anglicized ancestors who changed their name to Bootpret. Looking over archival materials and seeing the name that unified my matrilineal ancestry written in so many different ways, in so many different hands, made me really appreciate how delicate history is, and how difficult it can be to preserve physical evidence. Preserving things the “right” way is also something I thought about a lot in this project, both for my own research and records, but also in how something as small as a spelling change can become so distinctive and important.

Outside my family tree research, my experience in archival studies is pretty limited, but between this course and Siân Echard’s History of the Book which I am also enrolled in this semester, I am very excited to change that through the upcoming studies in the RBSC.

Cheers y’all

PS Sylvia Plath reading her poetry aloud is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard and it’s something that makes me very glad for the art of preservation