Month: June 2026

By Jazmine Aldrich

Regular readers of this blog may recall that in January 2025, I wrote about the Eastern Townships Resource Centre (ETRC)’s project to digitize, transcribe, and describe the oral histories within our holdings. This post will serve as an update on that project and a vision of what is still to come.

To recap, the ETRC had over 700 audio and audio-visual recordings digitized from magnetic tape media in 2024. These archival treasures come from 11 different fonds and collections held by the ETRC and range from ethnographic interviews to organizational histories and beyond. Once digital copies were secured, we hired two capable archives technicians – Kevin Mancini and Anna-Karina Poronovich to transcribe and describe the recordings.

This project was initially funded by Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP) for the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 fiscal years. This nearly $100,000.00 investment in local heritage allowed us to embark on a project that we could have only dreamed about as a small heritage not-for-profit.

As of early 2026, the DHCP program has been permanently discontinued; while our funding is secured through the end of our project, never again will community-based organizations such as the ETRC have access to this federal funding. If you would like to stand with Canada’s heritage institutions to protest this and other cuts to critical funding, please write to the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages.

Though our DHCP funding for transcription and description ran out around the turn of 2026, we were able to secure funding to continue description work through Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ)’s Programme de soutien au traitement des archives privées. Kevin and Anna-Karina continued their work through the first quarter of this year, culminating in a presentation at the ETRC’s 14^th Annual Colloquium on Quebec Studies, Quebec Past and Present (QPP) on March 27 of this year.

Kevin and Anna-Karina’s presentation at QPP, entitled “From Farm to Archive: An Exploration into Oral Histories of the Eastern Townships​” highlighted the richness of the oral histories that they have worked with over the last year-and-a-half. The presenters also offered important takeaways about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in heritage work. Audience members were fascinated with the project, expressing their interest in a lively question period and in conversation after the panel. Colloquium participants were interested in using the project as a case study for using AI tools for transcription in other heritage projects, and in using the oral histories themselves for a variety of research projects.

The ETRC also benefitted from the support of four practicum students in the McGill University School of Information Studies to advance this project; those students are Leo Jones, Emily Jarjour, Sam Davin, and Jess Flacksenburg. Each student received course credit in exchange for 100 hours of transcription, description, and archival research to write biographical sketches for the interviewees.

There is a second component to the DHCP-funded project that began last August, and that is to record new oral histories to complement our existing holdings. In particular, the focus of the new oral histories is to diversify the voices represented in our holdings by inviting people who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+, BIPOC, immigrants, and other cultural and religious minorities to co-create their own narratives.

As an institution of memory, we know that our collecting practices have historically focused on the dominant members of society; as a result, our archives disproportionately represent Caucasian, heterosexual, cisgendered people who practice Christianity. As people who live in the Townships, however, we know that this does not accurately represent the vibrant society that we live in today, nor has it for much of our Townships’ history. We cannot fabricate historical documents, but we can try to make our archival memory inclusive of more lived experiences moving forward.

Through this component of the project, we are interested in documenting a variety of experiences of living in the Eastern Townships right now and in the last few decades. Following up on the legacy oral histories in our archives that were recorded from the 1970s to the late 1990s, this project serves as an update on life in the Townships from a greater variety of participants and perspectives.

Last summer, the ETRC hired Dr. Ann Scowcroft to conduct the new oral histories. Dr. Scowcroft’s educational, professional, and personal background means that she is well-placed to facilitate these interviews with compassion and curiosity. Dr. Scowcroft has already completed ten interviews with more scheduled in the coming weeks – our goal for the project being twenty new interviews in total.

I will close by saying that the ETRC is actively seeking funding to continue both components of our oral history work. We welcome all suggestions for funding opportunities that might further this work. We also accept monetary donations through the Bishop’s University Foundation. If you are interested in learning more about our work, please contact the ETRC Archives.

By Jazmine Aldrich (ETRC Head Archivist) and Etienne Domingue (ETRC Director)

For many Townshippers, “Marjorie Goodfellow” is a household name. Marjorie Elizabeth Goodfellow (1938-2024) was the only child of Edgar and Annie (née McElrea) Goodfellow, Ms. Goodfellow was born and raised in Sherbrooke. She spent much of her life on her family’s farm on Chemin des Écossais. She earned two undergraduate degrees in two of Quebec’s anglophone universities (Bishop’s University ‘59 and McGill University ‘60), followed by a Master of Library Science degree (McGill University ‘67) that would launch her career in the library world. Ms. Goodfellow worked in Ottawa and Montreal before returning to the Townships following the death of her father in 1971. She continued to work as a library consultant and a genealogical and historical researcher—a passion that remained with her until the very end of her life. 

​Ms. Goodfellow is remembered by many as a founding member of the Townshippers’ Association where she defended the rights of English speakers to the provincial and federal governments. She was adamant that the same standards in healthcare should apply to members of both official language communities and served on the Board of Directors of the CUSE (now the CHUS) for 13 years. The Quebec government chose Ms. Goodfellow to represent the Eastern Townships on a provincial committee to advise the minister of health on service issues in the English-speaking community.

​Ms. Goodfellow nurtured a passion for local history, sitting on the Board of Directors of the Sherbrooke Historical Society and was a founding member of the Eastern Townships Heritage Foundation—the precursor to the Eastern Townships Resource Centre. She also helped found the Sherbrooke and District University Women’s Club and the Sherbrooke Library Board. In 1985, she became a Trustee Member of Bishop’s University and was part of the University’s Planning Committee. In 1993, Bishop’s University conferred Ms. Goodfellow with an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Civil Law. 

Ms. Goodfellow was involved with the Eastern Townships Resource Centre from its founding, serving many terms on the ETRC Board of Directors and the ETRC Archives Committee. Her passion for Eastern Townships history and her confidence in the ETRC led her to entrust her rich documentary legacy to our archives. Though she began depositing archival material with the ETRC in 2010, she held on to much of it until the end of her life – drawing on material for her yet-unpublished manuscript.

The ETRC received generous funding through QAHN’s Supporting Heritage Awareness, Recognition and Engagement (SHARE) program to begin processing the extensive and complex Marjorie Goodfellow fonds (P180), which comprises the largest single donation of archival material received by the ETRC to date. This grant also supported the inaugural Goodfellow Memorial Keynote Address—a public lecture given at the 2026 edition of Quebec Past and Present: the 14^th Colloquium on Quebec Studies, hosted by the ETRC at Bishop’s University on March 27 and 28.

Dr. Thierry Nootens—director of the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises and professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières delivered this year’s lecture. Dr. Nootens drew upon the Marjorie Goodfellow fonds as the basis of his presentation, following several wintry days spent poring over the semi-processed archives.

Dr. Nootens’ talk was entitled “’Will you see if you can find my white Ban-Lon sweater’ : les lettres de Marjorie Goodfellow à ses parents, 1959-1961” and took place on Saturday, March 28 at 11:15 am in Bishop’s University’s Tomlinson Hall, located on the ground floor of McGreer Hall. Dr. Nootens delivered his talk in French with a bilingual question and answer period. The first of its kind, the ETRC hopes to make the Goodfellow Memorial Keynote Address an annual tradition to underscore Ms. Goodfellow’s innumerable contributions to our organization and to Quebec heritage, more broadly.

Meanwhile, the project to process the Marjorie Goodfellow fonds is progressing well and we are looking forward to sharing the product of this monumental effort, later this summer. We are grateful for the support that QAHN has provided in order to ensure that Ms. Goodfellow’s legacy is preserved through her archives, and that her mission lives on through the ETRC’s public programming.