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The Letters: Provenance

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Like the children themselves, the McQueen letters are scattered across the country. The bulk of the collection can be found in the McQueen-Lowden Family Fonds housed in the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they were deposited by Relief Williams Mackay, a descendant of Mary Bell McQueen Wisdom. Before doing so, Mackay privately published a family history, entitled Simple Annals: The Story of the McQueens of Sutherland's River (Pictou: Advocate Publishing, 1986). She made reference in the book to at least eleven letters for which originals cannot be found. The Nova Scotia Archives also holds a microfilm copy of letters, bills, daybook and account book of Daniel McQueen and D.R. Lowden, the originals of which are in the Pictou County Museum.

Smaller collections of McQueen papers have been deposited by McQueen descendants at the British Columbia Archives, the Nicola Valley Museum Archives Association, and the Rossland Museum & Archives in British Columbia.

The papers would perhaps never have been brought to scholarly attention had it not been for Karen Balcom who, while working with Margaret Conrad as a graduate student at Dalhousie University, mentioned Simple Annals to Alison Prentice, a history professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. After reading Relief Williams Mackay's chronicle of the teaching sisters, Alison contacted the author and encouraged her to deposit the letters in the Nova Scotia Archives. In 1996 Alison hired Sandra Barry to help assess and transcribe the letters in the Nova Scotia Archives and incorporate those found in British Columbia repositories. Meanwhile, Jean Barman, Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, began using the McQueen correspondence in her research and soon discovered more letters held by family members in British Columbia. These, too, eventually found their way to archives in British Columbia.