Letters to/from the OLD COUNTRY: Ukrainian Canadian Personal Memoirs Project

July 14, 2009 -- An initiative at the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan

Help us to research the Ukrainian Canadian letter-writing tradition and create a correspondence collection.

We invite you to share with us any information on personal Ukrainian Canadian correspondence, especially those written to/from Saskatchewan.

Such correspondence is perhaps still kept in our homes, in old boxes, storage rooms, and attics, and we may not know the writers anymore. With the next spring cleaning, you may decide to get rid of it. If this is the case, let us know!

By helping this project, you will help us to discover more about Ukrainian heritage in Canada!

With many thanks,
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Project Coordinator (306) 966-8900
Nadya Foty, Project Researcher (306) 966-8040

St. Thomas More College, 1437 College Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 0W6, CANADA

Response requested by August 14, 2009

Details

With this letter, we would like to introduce a continuing research initiative at the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. Knowing your familiarity with the Ukrainian community in your area, we hope that you can also advise us on certain aspects of the proposed research.

Understanding that this is the first time that systematic research has ever been attempted with regard to the phenomenon of personal memoir-writing by Ukrainians in Canada, we are excited to address this issue in scholarship. We envision the outcomes of this project will be:

• Publication of the compiled bibliography of personal memoirs by Ukrainian Canadians
• Creation of the online search tool for the collection
• Creation of a Saskatchewan Ukrainian memoir collection (virtual or real)

At this point, we would like to explore the feasibility of attempting to create a full-fledged Ukrainian Canadian bibliography of personal memoirs, while first concentrating on memoir-writing phenomenon in Saskatchewan. Currently we propose the following order of inquiry, to explore:

• In Saskatchewan: all memoirs (current stage of project)
• In Western Canada: memoirs written by pre-WW2 settlers (second)
• In Western Canada: memoirs written by all categories of Ukrainian Canadians (third)
• In Canada: memoirs written by all categories of Ukrainian Canadians (fourth)

With this in mind, we would kindly ask you to share with us any suggestions you may have on what other organizations or individuals we could contact. Currently we would like to limit ourselves to personal memoirs (autobiographies) only, which have appeared as books or are archived as unpublished manuscripts.

We would appreciate greatly if you could spare a moment of your time and briefly reflect on the following:

• Do you have such personal memoirs in your office/library/archives?
• Is it possible to obtain a list of such memoirs?
• Do you know of any memoirs/autobiographies written in the community?

Thank you very much for your time and expertise. Please feel free to contact Nadya via email or phone. We would be grateful if you could get back to us by August 14th, 2009. We would be happy to follow up this inquiry in a way most convenient for you, either by phone or via email to discuss these matters.