Digging through Quidi Vidi history taught me a lot about hidden treasures in our archives

Hilda Chaulk Murray walks partway up the grassy slope just left of the bandstand on the north shore of Quidi Vidi Lake.

She stops, looks at me and nods. Then she turns back, sweeping her arm over the wide stretch of grass before her.

"It was probably in this stretch, right here," she said.

Victory. Finally.

I'd been trying for weeks to figure out where Charles Danielle which could be pronounced "Dan-yell" or "Dan-eel," depending on which folklorist or archivist or historian you talk to built his opulent hotel, the Royal Lake Pavilion, back in the 1890s.

• Down at the lake: Tales of eccentric characters, unique buildings, strange sports and wild parties on the shores of Quidi Vidi

No amount of Googlingcould pin it down.

Luckily,I'dfound Murray, an author whose interest in the history of farming in St. John's was sparked in the 1990s by a writing contest held by the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador (WANL).

She spent the next few years interviewing descendants of farmers, piecingtogether the city's agricultural history. The result was her 2002 book, The Cows Don't Know It's Sunday.

I found herafter a person I was told to contact told me to contact someone else, who then told me to contact someone else, who then mentioned a book, but not by title: "Something about cows? It's a history of farming!"

Sure enough, Murrayhad spoken to relatives of the man who rented his farmlandto Danielle, and another piece of the story clicked into place.

No boulders were dodged in the making of this series

As I'd find out over and over as I did the research for the CBC's mini-documentary series, Down at the Lake,this is exactly how ourhistory isput together.

• Watch the full Down at the Lake series

We know the stories of our history the hotel at the lake, the music at Fort Pepperrell, the short-lived HMP rowing team that was disbanded after a prisoner jumped ship and bolted because someone told somebody about it. And that somebody told somebody else, and that somebody told somebody else.

Maybe someone wrote it down. Maybe a newspaper reported on it. Maybe fingers crossed someone took a picture.

And then, once it was all old enough to be history, maybe someone donated it to an archive.

Finding those stories takes another string of lucky breaks: I'm sure glad WANL launched that writing contest and inspired Murray's interest in agriculture.

And I'mgratefulLaura Tulk, a summer student at MUN's Special Collections and Archives thought there might be a picture of the Royal Lake Pavilionin the geography archives somewhere and was right.

Walking the aisles between towering cabinets of microfiche rolls, phoning all the Murrays in the phone book, hanging around Quidi VidiVillage asking people if they knew who ownedthe church, heading from archive to archive to dig through pictures and court records and old magazines, I kind of understood theIndiana Jones character.

Sure, I wasn't outrunning any boulders, but digging into history was a wild ride.

Yarnsunspoolingright now

There are at least 110 different archives in the province, if you go by the Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives' membership numbers.

"They're everything from a very small community museum to the Rooms," said Mary Ellen Wright, the organization's archives advisor.

She laughs when I ask her if we'll ever come close to telling all of the stories from the province's past.

"Oh, no, no, no," she said.

"We'll never tell them because we need different things from the past. Every generation looks at things again, they look at it from a different perspective."

There are new yarnsunspooling across the province right now.

Asking the right questions

Them Days, a magazine and archive in Labrador, posts old photos they know nothing about to their Facebook page, asking people to identify the stories and the characters in the images.

• Them Days sorts through thousands of mystery photos, wants help

Storiesalso open up when we ask questions about the records we already know about, she said.

The picture of the Royal Pavilion, the hotel on Quidi Vidi Lake, does a lot more than prove, once and for all, that the hotel existed and was pretty fancy indeed (though it still doesn't show us exactly where it was.)

It gives us a picture of class, of social status, she said.It shows what the upper-class looked like and valued, and who got to participate.

'Looking at the absences'

And there are stories in what's left out of those records. Wright calls this "looking at the absences."

The man who built the hotel on the lake had a building and a skating rink in Bannerman Park before he moved down to Quidi Vidi. His Bannerman operations included a costume bank, fancy balls and elaborate ice carnivals. But in 1878, fire destroyed it all.

It's widelyrecorded that Danielle had enemies and the fire was deliberately set.

But it's not clear why, exactly, some people disliked him.

"There's a sniff of homophobia about it," said Philip Hiscock, a folklorist and former archivist.

Right now, we don't know much about the province's LGBT history, he points out it's an important absence in our records to be looked at.

'There are stories being lost'

Both Hiscock and Wright said funding for the province's archives has changed and declined over the years.

"We were able to acquire things in the 1980s that today, I know the archives have to turn down," Hiscock said.

To take on new donations of pictures, records or writings, archives need space, and they need staff to process the items so they can be found when they're looked for.

Without money, space and staff are in short supply.

"Things even if they're accepted they don't get processed in the same way," Wright said.

So are stories being lost?

"Oh, certainly," Hiscock said. "There are stories being lost."

Wright, though, is less certain.

"Well, I guess you don't know, do you?"

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