Odd Coincidences

I have not been updating but I have been working in the project.

Last fall the project morphed from a purely personal pursuit to an academic research project with a heavily personal component.

I took a class called the history of native American education and had the chance to choose to do a research paper on the boarding school of my choice. Of course I chose St. Catherine's. I was surprised to learn that there was not much written about the school.

I still was able to get quite a bit from two books about the founder and some info about from old newspaper articles. Luckily for my personal project the bulk of the info was from the first forty years of the school. My grandmother's time there would fall in the first thirty years.

I learned some about what it would have been like for her in a technical sense and started to come to grips with what it must have been like to have no real family just these well-meaning nuns. Nuns who from the looks of it had very little real world experience, certainly no sense of how to mother.

Some time in the near future I will dig inti my notes and share some nuggets.

Now I am following up with a research project in the archives. Trying to ferret out what the student experience was like. And why the school lasted so long.

The coincidence was that this week I have been parking in a lot (because it was free) near enough to walk to the archives.

When I was walking back to my car I noticed that I had parked right across from the original bldg. The one where surely my grandma had either lived or studied or both. Of course there is an entire cemetery between my car and the old grounds. But I could see the huge adobe with the bell tower rising out of the trees.

At times I feel so close to unraveling the history and then again so far away.

The archdiocese won't respond to my request to see their archives. The catholic schools office here in Albuquerque hasn't yet decided if they will let me see their records. And I can't get to Bensalem to see the mother house stuff for at least another year.