Sr. Phelan, Kay Schmitt and Sr. Mary Louise Gavan (left to right) ponder a query sent by e-mail.

This year, though, with a move to a new home for the archives on hold until sometime next year, Sister Phelan has had to ratchet up her capacity for tolerance. She’s also had to shore up her knowledge in an area she never imagined needing: materials used in insulating roofs.

The anticipated move from cramped quarters at Villa Duchesne to a site just two blocks west of the Provincial House has been delayed by roofing problems. The roof of the new archives – the former Lashley branch of the St. Louis Public Library — was insulated with Beazer Phenolic Foam. The foam was used as a component of roof insulation, particularly in low-slope roofs, during the 1980s. When the material gets wet, it forms a highly acidic compound that has accelerated corrosion of roofs and metal roof decks.

Under terms of a class-action suit, some financial relief is available to help compensate building owners for damage. But a maze of legal requirements, involving inspections, reports and claims, combined with the need to plan for a new roof, has delayed the move for months.

The official opening of the new archives, originally scheduled for November 2002 is now tentatively planned for fall 2003. Also on hold until next year are Sister Phelan’s plans to move to Rome, where she will become General Archivist for the international Society of the Sacred Heart.

Sr. Phelan (right) and Sr. Gavan come across a surprise in the archive's collections.

A row of file cabinets stuffed with files of index cards on Religious of the Sacred Heart in the United States from 1818 up to the present are ready too. So are 18 boxes labeled the 'Sister Marie Louise Martinez Collection.' “They contain notes from her years of research on the history of the Society in the Mississippi Valley and beyond: Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Peru, Chile and New Zealand,” Sister Phelan said. The notes are being transformed into a book by some of the best writers in the province, Sister Phelan said.

Bound volumes of annual letters from each of the Society’s convents around the world, accounts from every convent around the world, are there too, a reservoir of anecdotal information. The reports, required by the Society’s founder, Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, began in 1841 and, except for the war years in the early- to mid-1940s, continued through 1966, when the move from large convents to smaller communities began.

Sr. Margaret Phelan surveys stacks of gray archival boxes ready to move from crowded quarters at Villa Duchesne to the new archives near the Society's U.S. Provincial House.

Sister Phelan’s interest in archival work began just 12 years ago when she served as translator for the first-ever meeting of the Society’s archivists from all over the world. “I was the simultaneous interpreter for two weeks. I listened to these women talking about their passion and I fell in love with it,” she said.

Besides helping researchers, Sister Phelan answers a constant flow of questions that come by postal service, e-mail, phone and sometimes personal visit. Requests come in many forms. The archives are useful, for instance, to genealogists, to RSCJ writing memoirs, to alumnae planning reunions, to historians working in a variety of subjects.

The collection began developing in the 1970s, when the decision was made to bring together records of schools that had been closed in the previous decade and earlier in the Society’s history. The first archives consisted of two rooms at Maryville College in St. Louis County. Then, when five U.S. provinces merged into one two decades ago, a flood of new materials arrived. So, at the former infirmary at Villa Duchesne, beds went out; shelves came in.

Among the Society’s 33 provinces worldwide, the U.S. archives are the Society’s largest except for the archives at the Motherhouse in Rome. The U.S. archives consist of “millions of papers,” Sister Phelan said. “Researchers say the depth of the collection is extraordinary.”

In Rome, in addition to working with materials from Sacred Heart provinces around the world, including the growing provinces in Africa and Asia, Sister Phelan will oversee such treasures as the original letters of Saints Madeleine Sophie and Philippine Duchesne. She’ll live and work with RSCJ from around the world, a situation she’s well equipped for. Sister Phelan grew up in a tri-lingual family speaking Spanish, French and English — the three languages of the Society today. “In my family, if you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you shifted to another,” she said. Her father worked for the U.S. State Department in Foreign Service.

Sr. Phelan with Marcella Sanders, who will retire when the archives moves to its new home.

Kay Schmitt and Sister Gavan will continue working in the archives after the move and Marcella Sanders, 89, will retire. Mrs. Sanders, aunt of Sister Nancy Koke, the Society’s Director of Vocations for the United States, has had a long career working for the U.S. Province, first in financial services and then, for the past 21 years, in the archives.