Bio
Neighborhood Stories
The sound of young girls chattering filled the air. Their plaid skirts swished side to side as they walked across the school yard.
They didn’t notice me as I walked the school grounds. It had taken me an hour on both a subway and a bus to get here from downtown Toronto. The school was nestled in a quiet and ordinary, if rather posh, North American suburb. Around us, cars were parked in driveways of comfortable homes, and trees lined the sidewalks.
I walked towards the front entrance of the old stone school, passing beneath the large cross that topped the roof, piercing through the crisp blue sky. I opened the heavy door and passed through the foyer. Everyone was outside for recess, and silence washed over me.
I continued down the corridor and adjusted my purse, which hung heavy from my shoulder, stuffed far too full with my laptop and notebook. I was ready for my research appointment at the archive of an organization of nuns, housed on the upper-level of their abbey school for girls.
As a graduate student of sixteenth and seventeenth-century European history, I had been hesitant to enroll in the local history practicum that had sent me here in the first place. This wasn’t a castle or a battlefield. I was visiting a simple suburban school. Local history felt small and, in comparison to the grand tales of larger-than-life personalities in faraway places that I was used to, it felt too close to home. Boring, even.
And yet, within the walls of that archive, where I pored over manuscripts from box after box of yellowing files, and in the lower-level dining room, where I ate dinner surrounded by elderly women who shared their memories, I discovered a world of important stories that risked being forgotten.
In their records, I came across references to the Order’s foundress, a woman who went up against the Vatican half a millenium ago to promote girls’ education. Chronicles told of brave young nuns that journeyed across the Atlantic from Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century to aid the ailing potato famine refugee families pouring out of ships into Toronto. I learned how they, and other women like them, founded a network of social services—schools for children, colleges at the university for female students, hospitals, and orphanages.
I never saw Toronto the same again; everywhere I looked, I saw the legacy of their work. It struck me that the stories of the very neighbourhood you live in, and the ordinary people that you encounter in your everyday life, can be extraordinary. As a journalist and historian, it is now my mission to uncover these hidden stories around us and to bring them to light.