Laurel Parson, General Synod archivist, has retired after a career with the church that began in the early 1990s. Parson’s last day in the office was Aug. 31.
When Parson was attending the University of Windsor, earning a combined bachelor’s degree in English and history, she knew she didn’t want to be a teacher, she says. So when one of her classmates described her plan to go to the University of Western Ontario for a master’s degree in library science, Parson was immediately intrigued, she says, despite not having known much about archivists before.
“Once she started describing what she would be doing, all the bells and whistles started going off for me,” Parson says. She went to Western herself to obtain her master’s degree and has been working in archives ever since, mostly at the Office of General Synod. Parson did a brief stint on the “archive circuit,” she says, including other diocesan and university archives, when budget cuts eliminated her archival assistant role for General Synod in the 2000s. She returned in 2003 and stayed.
Some of the key accomplishments of Parson’s career in the archives have involved providing information to residential school survivors and Indigenous communities as Canada and the Anglican Church reckoned with the schools’ legacy, she says.
Beginning in the 2000s, Parson helped survivors access records to prove they had in fact been at residential schools as part of the requirement for accessing Common Experience Payments (CEPs), compensating them for the schools’ impact on their lives. The CEP process required some survivors to prove how long they had been at the schools, despite the government’s incomplete records, she says.
That made church records, like those the Anglican Church of Canada holds, a vital resource. Parson did much of the work of preparing and providing church documents to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada beginning around 2011. She and researchers working with her spent long hours scanning, describing and cataloguing photos and documents over the course of several years.
Parson describes that project as a “very proud piece” of her time with the church. The documents her team catalogued during that time continue to be of help to Indigenous people, band councils and others doing research on missing or unaccounted-for children, genealogies and historical scholarship, she says.
One such researcher is associate professor Val Marie Johnson, who teaches social justice and community studies at Saint Mary’s University. She says Parson has been instrumental in helping her and the Inuvialuit people she works with access and sift through what they find in the archives.
“Laurel has been invaluable in making the Inuvialuit collaborators that I’ve worked with feel welcome in the Anglican archives; [has] shared her knowledge of the archived material and been willing to share the material herself,” Johnson says.
She describes Parson as a “key intermediary and a keeper of knowledge” in a project that includes tracing the family histories of Inuvialuit residents in communities disrupted by residential schools.
The nature of the material that comes up in residential school research is often difficult, Johnson says, but Parson was both tenacious and gentle in dealing with it. That meant being willing to face the painful or disturbing information that came up when researching abuses facilitated by an institution Parson worked for, Johnson adds, and simultaneously being patient and kind while working with researchers and families of former residential school students.
“Because it’s such difficult material and because we really care about it, we can get excited or upset or frustrated,” Johnson says. “Laurel has just been very level, calm, capable [and] crucial because of her knowledge of the material.”
Parson has always maintained thorough documentation of archival practices and file locations, and for years has worked to digitize as many records as possible, efforts she says should make the transition easier for her successors. The Anglican Church of Canada is currently interviewing candidates for a new archivist.
In her retirement, Parson looks forward to catching up on her lifelong passion for reading, deepening her involvement at her Methodist church and volunteering to help organize the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
“I’ve got stacks of books waiting for me,” Parson says.
