What is The Book of Mary?
As I write this I am not exactly sure where it will go, but I start with seeing the beauty and power in the told and untold stories. I want to make visible what has been invisiblized.
Who is Mary?
I used to write lists of jobs I’d like to do when I grew up. On those lists were always writing and research. Even though they both always appeared on the lists, I never believed I could make a living from writing and I didn’t know how to turn research into a career. And I definitely didn’t know how to do both at the same time.
Writing has always been with me from stories I wrote as a child to book reports in elementary school to 10 page papers in college to business letters and then emails at work.
Research for me is about curiosity. I really don’t care what I am looking for. It is the hunt for information for me. I love using my creativity to figure out what information might be useful, where it might be located, and how to get access. Which is why archival research works so well for me. As an archivist it is my job to help people find what they need, not just what they are looking for.
Often times people come into the archives asking for something specific like a map, when they are actually looking for information that might be found in another format. For example, I had a researcher who wanted a map of downtown, block by block, every 10 years over the course of 3 decades to identify the changing boundaries of the public market overtime. It was very straight forward to him, but what he envisioned didn’t exist in our archives or any where else I could think of.
Only the Sanborn Maps1 consistently show the footprint of buildings in the last 150 years or so. However, instead of reprinting the volumes of maps, overlays with the change would be pasted on top of the existing map. Some even 3 or 4 layers deep. Lucky for the researcher, we had official Public Market reports2 and a few other documents with descriptions of some of locations, so we could approximate the boundaries over time. The information need was boundaries over time not a necessarily a map.
You can see by the links included that I LOVE to share information. My joy is to provide people with information that I hope is useful. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; but for me searching is always interesting and fun.
While I had not added justice to my list of jobs, it is integral to my sense of self. It manifests in my ever present desire to elevate stories of underrepresented people: Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latine, other people of color who fall in-between, women, LGBTQIA+, non-binary… I could keep listing out identities, but it really can boil down to the Other. Any one different than the white, straight, middle/upper class cis-gendered male. You know the ones who created the structure we live in and benefit the most from it.
There are other people who can do the work of telling the white history, but I want to find the stories of people who were left out and forgotten and help other people find those stories too. Because those stories exist and have always existed in some form or another.
I am a gay white woman who continues to dive deep into white supremacy culture in my own body and in the world. I do this work because I want to heal my humanity. This is where I am starting. Hopefully you will stay with me on the journey.
The Sanborn fire insurance map company created maps that show details of buildings (including construction materials, use of buildings, and sometimes name of owners), streets, lot lines, and neighborhood infrastructure like roads and water mains. They were updated overtime to show changes to structures and properties with alterations to the original base maps. These changes were physically pasted over the old information so the maps were always up-to date. Sanborn maps are a good source for block by block street map illustrations. (I will do a post on Sanborn maps at another time.)
It is documents like this one that I particularly find interesting especially for the time period. I think about how Chinese and Japanese people are being referred to and treated in 1919 in Portland, OR. I also notice the women’s names as well. Who was present? Whose names are recorded?