An attic stuffed with old letters, cherished photographs, even canceled checks can tell a lot about a family, a city or a nation.

When the "family" is a group of nuns and students with convents and independent schools from Miami to Seattle, from San Diego to Boston, the "attic" is called an archives. When the order's pioneer leader is one of the few U.S. canonized saints, the archives is a lode for American and church historians.

"From the 19th century to now, our archives really tell a story of nuns crossing borders," said Sister Frances Gimber, the archivist for the Society of the Sacred Heart's U.S. Province Archives. "Not just national, geographic borders, but racial and class borders. Our archives tells church history, but it's also the everyday life of the nuns, their students and their families."

Later this month, the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious is coming to St. Louis for its fourth triennial national conference. Participants will visit the society's new state-of-the art, free-standing archives in the Central West End. Catholic Church law mandates that religious orders keep records, but few orders have free-standing, temperature-controlled buildings wired for the computer age.

This summer, the society moved into the 6,500-square-foot building at 4537 West Pine Boulevard. Its dedication is Sunday.Branch, which opened in 1968. Architects and construction workers took nearly three years to gut and reconfigure the building for dustless preservation.

In June, three tractor-trailers and 26 movers transferred treasures from the society's former national archives, housed since the 1980s at Villa Duchesne-Oak Hill School in Frontenac, to the rehabbed building, which is less than two blocks east of the society's national headquarters on West Pine.

Ever since 1818, when Mother Philippine Duchesne and four other French nuns immigrated to St. Louis, nuns' letters, student records and documents have been stacking up. The collection of millions of papers reflects the society's rich St. Louis history, as the first order of Catholic religious women to settle in this region, the first west of the Mississippi and the fifth in the entire United States.

Materials reflect the nuns' experiences from New Zealand to the Belgian Congo to Korea.

William Schickel's semi-abstract painting of St. Philippine Duchesne–used in poster form high above St. Peter's Basilica in Rome at her 1988 canonization - sets the building's spiritual tone in the foyer.

Prayers fill many shelves. Duchesne's prayer book with her notes in its margins is one treasure. Two centuries of Mass programs and hymns can be found in print and on audiotape. Additional audiotapes include hundreds of eight-day retreat lectures given to nuns across the country by famous 20th-century, spiritual retreat masters, including the Revs. John Courtney Murray, Barnabas Ahern and Edward Dowling.

A Civil War historian might not expect to find clues to a secret romance at the nuns' archives, but that is what happened to Kalina I. Hintz of Cincinnati. She was chasing the story of the secret fiancée of Union Gen. John Fulton Reynolds. He was leading the Second Wisconsin Regiment when he was killed in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. The general was wearing a woman's gold ring shaped like clasped hands. The name Kate was engraved on it. Kate Mary Hewitt of Philadelphia showed up at his wake, introduced  herself to his family and told their secret.

"Not even his family knew about their engagement," said Hintz in a telephone interview.

Hintz found that Hewitt had boarded at Eden Hall, a Society of the Sacred Heart's boarding school in Philadelphia, which closed in the 1960s. A Baltimore Archdiocese archivist referred Hintz to the nuns' U.S. province house in St. Louis. That, in turn, led her to the  society's archives, then housed at Villa. Its former archivist, Sister Margaret Phelan, took over.

Phelan rescued Hewitt from oblivion, e-mailing and photocopying material  for Hintz's proposed book. The archives' extensive 1860s Eden Hall papers included Hewitt's adult baptismal and confirmation certificates, a ledger of her boarding accounts and information about her adopted sister. The real key was a glowing, detailed letter of recommendation for Hewitt written after the general's death when she was asking to join the Daughters of Charity. Hewitt did not remain a nun for long, and Hintz is hunting for later chapters.

"Sister was wonderful; I never even went to St. Louis," said Hintz. Phelan, who planned the new facility, recently moved to Rome, where she runs her order's international archives.

Researchers may request appointments to visit the St. Louis archives as long as they explain their project. The archives is there for its stories to be shared, said Sister Mary Louise Gavin, associate archivist.

Among the documents displayed at the new archives is the $95 annual tuition receipt for one of Duchesne's students, Rosalie Lisa, the American Indian-Hispanic daughter of early St. Louis fur trader Manuel Lisa. At the time, around the 1820s, the average price of a St. Louis house was $41.

There is also a letter Duchesne wrote to St. Louis Mayor William Carr Lane in the 1830s imploring him to do something about boys swimming naked in the old Chouteau's Pond. Her female students at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, the City House, - then at Convent and Broadway, less than a mile north of Soulard Market - had a clear view of the skinny-dipping.

Doctoral theses by nuns and hundreds of books written by the nuns and their students are shelved in the visitors' research room. The doctoral thesis of theologian Jane Schaberg–today famous for rescuing the reputation of Mary Magdalene - is among them.

In it, the St. Louis native took the Matthew Gospel 28:29 baptismal line "in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit" and argued that the idea of a Trinitarian God was not some idea that evolved after Christ's time, as generations of biblical scholars had written. Key biblical scholars have embraced the Schaberg thesis.

Shelves include hundreds of books by the society's schools' alumnae, including 19th century novelist Kate Chopin, 20th century novelist Mary McCarthy, 19th century essayist Agnes Repplier and 21th century photographer Carlota Duarte. Phelan planned the building with room to grow. Until that space is needed, the Ursuline sisters are renting 10 percent of the shelving for their regional archives. 

Now, with room to spread out at 11-foot long, waist-high sorting counters, Gimber and Gavin have begun processing the 7 percent of the collection that has never been cataloged.  

"Eventually, we want to put more of this online," said Gimber.

Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.