Michele Levandoski, director of the SSND North American Archives in Milwaukee, recently shared some thoughts on a Facebook page run by the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious. The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
What's your job like?
When I bring visitors into the archives, they see a bunch of gray boxes sitting on gray shelves in a gray room and they think, ‘This is boring – there is nothing interesting here.’
I tell them opening each box is what adds color into the room. When you open a box, out come the people and the stories, and the events – and they are interesting.
Inside each box is a little piece of people’s lives (not just the Sisters, but their students and family, and members of the community). You get to view a snapshot of it.
It’s incredibly interesting and never boring. People usually leave more excited then when they come in!
How did you get interested in archives?
When I graduated high school, I quit my job at Sears so that I could have fun the summer before college.
However, I knew if my dad caught me just sitting around the house, he’d make me find work, so I started researching my family tree and quickly became obsessed.
After college, I worked for a few years and continued my research. The more time I spent in archives, the more I loved being there.
I’d always loved history and I loved working alone, so archives was a perfect combination of all those loves!
What's the craziest thing you've found?
When working for the diocese, I found $28,000 in a bag in a filing cabinet. Long story, but we figured out who it belonged to and returned it.
At the diocese, I also found a bone that a priest took from one of the catacombs in Rome in the 1920s.
So for a while I had a Roman Christian bone sitting in my office. We eventually buried it!
