A Vancouver Island University professor has received provincial recognition for more than 25 years of work to preserve the voices of soldiers who fought in Canada’s wars through the letters they sent home.
Stephen Davies, director of the Canadian Letters and Images Project, has been honoured with a provincial award of recognition from the British Columbia Historical Federation for the creation of the project which has scanned and digitized more than 40,000 letters sent home by Canadian soldiers.
Awards of recognition are given by the BCHF to individuals in honour of exceptional service through projects that preserve of B.C. history, noted a press release.
The award was presented at the federation’s annual awards gala May 3 in Williams Lake.
“I’m a Canadian historian with an interest in World War I, which I teach, and I was teaching it at that time when I created the project,” Davies said. “I really believe the letters are one of the best ways to teach about history and teach about war and for the students to understand what war really means, and the cost of war, and the individuals in war, but at that time there was very little Canadian material available.”
Davies began the project to collect about 200 letters that could be put online for his students to access, but as word got out, more people started making submissions and the collection has never stopped growing. Any letters submitted are only borrowed long enough to digitize and file them before they’re returned to families.
“We’re borrowing materials from across the country,” the professor said. “What’s happening is the families want to share them, but they also want to hold on to them.”
The project scope includes letters from soldiers involved in all of Canada’s wars.
“For example, we do have a number of collections from the South African War. We have the Riel Rebellion. We have World War I, World War II, Korea, some peacekeeping…” Davies said. “The materials we’re getting are generally not found anywhere else, for the most part. They’re not in museums. They’re not in archives. We’re the only source for most of these collections.”
He said the important thing for him is to make the past accessible, so the site is free to use, and to ensure the past is presented as it was, the material is also not edited or censored. Davies refers to it as “history in the raw” that reflects the personal aspects of soldiers' experiences, without interpretation.
He said he never expected the project to grow as it has.
“Obviously we tapped into something that was really close to the Canadian public that they want these stories to be shared,” he said.
One aspect that makes the project special is it shares the experiences of ordinary people who weren’t famous.
“It’s exactly the stories that don’t normally get told … These are people who have been forgotten, but their stories are equally important," Davies said. "The generals always get attention.”
Turning the letters into Word documents makes them more legible and searchable, but it takes people and resources to transcribe letters – most often from cursive script, which younger generations tend to find harder to decipher – and to digitize and catalogue the material, put it online and return letters to their owners.
Davies pointed to a thick binder, one of eight volumes of letters from just one soldier during the First World War. He admitted the project is falling behind trying to keep up with the workload, but he also doesn’t want to turn submissions away for fear there may not be a second chance to receive them. Often collections of old documents simply get thrown out by people who don’t want them or don’t have the space to keep them. Some collections received were found in a dumpster.
Letters sometimes come in a shoebox, Davies said, but every one goes into an archival plastic sleeve and then into a binder and the letters are returned to the family in that manner. The process is laborious, time-consuming and relies on the professor, student assistants and donations, and does not receive government funding. So far the project has digitized about 40,000 letters out of about 500,000 files in its collection.
But the work has its rewards – Davies said it’s interesting to see the range of users accessing the letters project's website.
“To be able to create something that is used by both Grade 5 students and professional historians has been for me one of the greatest achievements of it,” he said.
To learn more, visit www.canadianletters.ca.
