Already outgrowing its space, the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) North American Archives is home to an estimated 5,000 boxes, filling the shelves from floor to ceiling. These boxes contain the rich legacy and history of SSND in the form of official files and photos of sisters both living and deceased, mission records, daily chronicles, publications, photographs and artful expressions by the sisters including musical compositions, craftwork, dissertations, theses, correspondence and more.

“Once I really got into the collection, I realized how uncommon it is to have an archive where women are the primary drivers of what’s happening,” says Michele Levandoski, director of School Sisters of Notre Dame North American Archives. “To live in this world of amazing women and to just read through their history and see the amazing things they’ve done, the perseverance they have, their devotion to the church, their devotion to people, their devotion to the society around them and how they implement their ideas of what it is to live their charism. It is just phenomenal.”

Michele began her role with the SSND archives in August 2017, before there even was an official archive. It would be later in the fall of that year that she began the task of compiling the collection into its new central location on the Mount Mary University campus in Milwaukee. Over a six-week period, with the help of her husband, mom and others she enlisted for the task, they sorted and shelved thousands of boxes delivered by movers.

The archives represent the eight former North American provinces: Milwaukee; Baltimore; St. Louis; Canada; Mankato, Minnesota; Wilton, Connecticut; Chicago and Dallas; the two current provinces, Atlantic-Midwest and Central Pacific; mission extensions which are now the Province of Africa and Province of Latin America and the Caribbean; the Generalate in Rome; and anywhere else SSND has served.

Contributions to the collection arrive in massive deliveries, such as when there is a campus closure, but also filter in singularly via individual donations from sisters, students or relatives of sisters.

While written materials and photographs make up the bulk of the collection, interesting objects serve to bring the SSND story to life in a tangible way. Alongside intricate needlework, paintings and other valuables are interesting everyday items such as homemade cookie cutters and lamb-shaped molds that were used for making cakes and butter lambs during Easter celebrations.

“You can still smell the butter,” says Michele.

Also housed in the collection are such personal artifacts as one of Blessed Theresa’s socks and Mother Caroline’s lunchbox.

Michele finds the chronicles especially interesting. While sisters didn’t immediately keep extensive written records, there are some written records going back to the 1850s.

“In terms of archival materials, I think my favorite things are the chronicles, because they’re just so rich,” said Michele. “They can be mundane, you know, school opened on this day. We had this many students. And so on. But then when you are reading a really big chunk of them, you really get a sense of the writer. Some of the sisters have incredible senses of humor. There was one where the church caught fire, or the convent caught fire, and everybody was running around panicking, trying to get stuff out. The sister notes how the boys were throwing plates out the window, but then they were running carpets out of the building. And her response was, ‘run the plates and throw the carpets!’ You get a real sense that she had a dry sense of humor because she’s looking at this very tragic situation in a comical way.”

One of the main tasks for archives is processing or organizing the collections. Michele recalls that two of the largest collections she has worked on are the deceased sister files, which alone contain some 9,700 files, and the deceased sister photographs, which top out at more than 36,000 photos to date.

To that end, Michele and her team field some 1,000 reference requests each year. Most of these requests are from people who had a sister as a teacher and want to know where she is now. Others are from genealogists, SSND staff, authors and PhD candidates who are working on research for books, articles and even podcasts.

As the SSND story is still unfolding today, the team has also started an oral history program, capturing the stories of current sisters throughout North America.

“We’ve done over 100 interviews,” says Michele. “We originally started out with just a little audio recorder, and I would do them in person when I would see sisters. But now, thankfully, we can record via Zoom.”

“To be a woman surrounded by amazing women all day, I just couldn’t imagine a better job, to be honest,” said Michele. “The sisters are very humble and are not always comfortable sharing their accomplishments. I love that I can help be that voice for them and speak about all the incredible things they have accomplished in terms of teaching, social justice, working with the poor and for the Church.”

Learn more about the SSND North American Archives.