Week 4: St. Benedict's College

Once again I surveyed the Catholic Church Extension Society's letters of correspondence. In these files, I came across a folder dedicated to correspondence with St. Benedictine's College. St. Benedictine's College, now know as Benedictine College, was a Catholic College served to prepare students for a life in priesthood. Because of this, the Catholic Church Extension Society sponsored several various students who showed an interest in joining priesthood to attend the college each year. These documents reveal that the Extension Society was not only responsible for providing funding for the building of churches but also helped to fund education. These documents reveal the history of the society's transactions and provides insight into their purpose and goals.

Below are some examples of the files within the St. Benedict's College file:

List of the Course Curriculum for students at St. Benedict's

Course layout

Catalogue

Course Evaluation Card

Course Grades

Week 3: Extension Magazine

This week I continued to work on surveying the files from the Catholic Church Extension Society. Most of these files contained letters concerning appeals for assistance applications, as well as donations from various individuals. Also included in these files were pictures from churches that had received funding from the society as well as subscription requests to the society's Extension Magazine. The magazine was published in order to raise awareness of the Extension Society's mission by providing stories from Catholics and Churches throughout the U.S. that had received help. Along with these letters, I came across a letter of approval from the Vatican, praising the society for its work and recognizing it as a canonical institution. These files show the importance of archives because it provides information about the Catholic Church Extension Society and its history.

Here are some examples of the files:

Week 2: Catholic Church Extension Society

This week I was provided with a small collection to survey. I was given 3 boxes of files containing the archives of the Catholic Church Extension Society. The Catholic Church Extension Society is an organization founded by Father Francis Clement Kelley, in 1905, that raises money in order to fund the building and maintenance of Catholic churches in isolated regions of the U.S. The society was responsible for raising money and dispersing it to various parishes as well as providing ceremonial decorations and artifacts. The purpose of this was to provide support and funding to develop churches in poorer regions.

Today I started going through the first box of files labelled the "Catholic Church Extension Society Correspondence Letters: 1920-1923". Most of these files contain letters from priests and bishops asking for assistance in funding their churches as well as the corresponding letters either granting or denying funding. As part of my job, I have to sort through each individual letter and find important information, such as who the letters are written to and from, the dates of the letters, and what they are concerning. This information will be helpful in the future when trying to organize the material into a filed system.

To learn more about the Catholic Church Extension Society, including their history and their mission, you can check out their website here.

Loyola University Archives and Special Collections Internship Overview and Week 1

My name is Daniel Quinlan, I am currently a senior, in my final semester at Loyola University and am studying history. This fall, I will be working every Friday at the Archives and Special Collections department of Loyola University. The archive department is responsible for over 8,000 linear feet of archival collections ranging from faculty and alumni papers, university archives, Catholic collections, and Congressional archives. The Archive department is also home to roughly 11,600 rare books as well as audio, visual, and oral history collections.

As part of my job in the Archives department, I will be surveying, sorting, and maintaining a small collection. In surveying the material, I will have to go through various files, providing a description for each item so that they can be sorted and filed in a way that can be accessed by others. I will also be creating a small exhibit with material from the archives as well as learning to digitize material.

This week is my first week of work. I was given a tour of the archive department and was provided with several different packets to read detailing archive work. These packets provided information how to go about archiving material. They provided information on what to look for when surveying the files, such as dates, important names and places, as well as how to summarize the content in order to sort them and organize them.

For more information about the Archives and Special Collections department at Loyola, click here.