http://conceptu-alley.arts.ubc.ca/340-14th
The Fry's Cocoa box is obviously old. About the size of a large book, it is made of wood and covered for the most part in a faded pale blue silk. The trim is velvet that had once been royal blue overlaid with gold braid and tracery. The sepia photo on the lid is a head and shoulders image of a young woman wearing a light linen blouse with a silk scarf draped across her shoulders. Her hat is a wide brimmed, corsaged extravigance with a silk sash tied in a huge bow under her chin to hold the whole thing in place. The image is clearly from the early 1900`s and the hallmark dates from an era when people created elaborate and secure storage casks for their cocoa. The clasp is broken and the hinged lid lifts easily.
There is no order to the box: newspaper clippings; Christmas cards; photographs; and best of all, the postcards. About a hundred of them. Beautifully intact and perfectly legible, despite the fact that no real attempt has been made to preserve them. It`s odd in fact, that while their value was apparently recognized and they were saved for nearly one hundred years, yet they were stored carelessly jumbled together in complete and innocent disarray.
And there is no consistent pattern to the type of material that was saved, giving no clue as to why these particular items survived. Clearly much more must have been going on. For a start, the time frame represented here covers only a few years. The writers however, were diligent enough that surely they must have begun earlier and continued beyond this short period. And there is internal evidence of more correspondence. There are a number of references to letters that have just been received, or are promised to be written. Even if not all the promises are kept, there was certainly more. Much more.
In the spring of 2002, while poking about in a decidedly dark and slightly musty basement of my boyhood home, I found this surprising bit of family history. Over the next few months I transcribed and edited the cards, and posted them as a website, intitially intended for the interest of my extended family. But as I began to understand Emma, her siblings and her parents, a narrative began to emerge that shed some light on a pioneer family in the earliest days of Western Canada. I was, and still am, undecided whether this project will have real historical relevance beyond simply a family curiosity. There were too many gaps in the information to make it really viable. For the moment, though, it is worth investigating for a number of reasons.
The postcards have autograph text to be sure, but the written information is minimal, sometimes even terse. Fortunately there are other aspects to the cards that are just as informative. The design and layout, the illustrations and photographs, the stamps and postmarks, all combine to make a very informative series of artifacts. They begin to expand our notion of text, since far more than just the handwriting needs to be, read. Still there are a number of gaps in the information.
The project began to take the shape of historical fiction, first as a way of bridging some of those gaps, and then finally because some of the characters that appear in the cards are very compelling and naturally lend themselves to fictional speculation. A good story can have a basis in truth, and sometimes in a good story it is hard to distinguish what is fact and what is fiction. The story's essential accuracy is not necessarily harmed. According to Nietzsche,".. it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims." We can put our minds through and engage with both the historical and the fictional, even believe both elements. What is remembered and passed on is what will become the family narrative.
The stories emerged to me in a completely random manner, so I began to be interested in creating a similar non-linear experience for the reader. Thus there are many links embedded in each page. Each postcard can be an entry point to any number of explorations, some of them factual, some fictitious. And it is the reader who has control and ownership of the path through this narrative.
There is also a sense of space that the reader experiences. Since these cards are artifacts, they can easily be perceived as occupying a space in our field of view. Navigating through the cards is as much an exercise in negotiating the space as it is a matter of reading or understanding the text. It may in fact be a means of stepping around the information gaps.
While the original cards are a permanent and unalterable record, when transcribed online, the information loses that permanence. The plasticity of the medium allows the entire project to remain a work-in-progress, continually being updated and expanded as work in this area proceeds. The information is never static, and there is a constant need to check to make sure that the site is still relevant. Changes are technically painless, unlike print media, so I am more easily inclined to discard information that proves to be problematic. This will prove to be very useful.
Both the accessibility and the interactivity of the site have had an unexpected and delightful result. The material was recently discovered online by a distant cousin who is doing parallel family research on his Great Grandmother - who happens to be Emma's sister. Both of us drawn to the digital campfire, we have started comparing our information and sharing our sources. Hopefully, out of this collaboration will grow some worthwhile information. Many of the gaps are suddenly starting to be filled. Regardless how this project may turn out, it illustrates the vast potential of the Internet for co-operative research and publication. And whether or not it will have any academic value, this story itself will be enormously richer because of the collaboration.
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