Sr. Pat Eley, SP, (right) needs to be meticulous. First, she searches through a book more than a century old for French names. The handwriting is penned in a flowery style with ink that is now fading. Piecing together details and other translatable verses, she then must upload the results into an Excel spreadsheet.
She is ministering in the Providence Archives, transferring information on every woman who ever entered the Sisters of Providence. She’s currently working on her second leather-bound volume. This one covers 1915 – 1929.
Sometimes names are similar, or the only information that can be found on a woman is that she entered the community.
It’s a little like detective work mixed with a bit of puzzleology.
Sr. Mary Duffy, OP-T, Sr. Nora Murphy, OP-T, and Sr. Virginia Miller, SP, also work in the ministry to preserve the history of the Sisters of Providence and its various ministries (below).
Back in the day, before search engines and AI, when newspaper ink still rubbed off on your hands, clipping services would literally cut articles out of the newspapesr to help organizations track what was being written about them. The service would tag each clipping with the name of the publication and the date the story appeared. Companies prominently in the news could get hundreds of clippings per week. But a lot of extraneous material surfaced as well, just as it is with a web search. Part of the Sister’s job is to sort through the articles that really pertain to the Sisters or their historical ministries from those that just mention a ministry but are really about other topics. For instance, the archives don’t need an article about a car accident in which the victim was brought to a Providence hospital.
Srs. Virginia, Mary and Nora are sorting through years of the clippings, stored in banker boxes. They have completed the sort according to year and are now working on the month. Ultimately, the articles will be digitized.