Archivist digs deep into community’s past

there,” says Cole. Other times he may be in touch with family members wanting to know about an uncle or brother who belonged to the friars.

Sometimes Cole turns to the elders in the community for help. “I can go to somebody in the house and ask them questions.” Archivists such as Cole strive to maintain accurate, accessible records of members, ministries, properties, and more.

Their work helps preserve the community charism—that is, its spirit, personality, or raison d’etre. Every religious community, large and small, wants to ensure that the gift of its charism lives on, and every community has an archivist. It is often, but not always, a part-time ministry.

ARCHIVISTS ARE A BIT like detectives,” says Brother

Tom Cole, O.F.M. An archivist and vicar for his community, Cole digs into the records and finds treasures. They look like this: photos, member files, ledgers, personnel paperwork, solemn vows books, and digitized files about friars of past generations. These are men who built schools, universities, retreat centers, parishes, and foreign mission compounds. The friars often started with nearly nothing and over generations carved out substantive institutions and innovations.

As the community archivist, Cole organizes and preserves the record for his community. He also responds to requests. For instance, “Parishes having an anniversary will ask us when certain friars served

“Really if you went through the archives of any community, you would get such a sense of pride of what was accomplished,” says Cole. His community stretches back to Saint Francis in the year 1210. More recently, when the 19th-century German ruler Otto von Bismarck expelled religious communities from Germany during his Kulturkampf, one group of Franciscans fled to Patterson, New Jersey in 1876. The German-refugee friars set to work educating and evangelizing the many poor German immigrants streaming into the United States at that time. And that is the “lineage” to which Cole belongs today, acquiring and organizing the historical record for people now and into the future.

Cole says his deep dive into the archives has enriched him over the past nine years. “It gives me a different appreciation. People think archives are something that happened and ended but it’s part of a continuum.”