Bergevin Family papers, 1863-2013

Acquisition Information

Following her passing in 1922, Mary Parmelia Allard Bergevin's correspondence was inherited by her son, Arthur. Arthur added letters he had written to Marguerite Gohres Bergevin, his girlfriend and later wife, to the collection and arbitrarily split the correspondence between his four children, Artimesa Bergevin Pemberton, Margaret Jeanne Bergevin Butkis, Russel Bergevin, and Denise Bergevin Ryan O'Bryan. The content of each recipient's split of the original collection is unknown.

In the period before the letters were acquired by the Northwest and Whitman College Archives, Russel's daughter Colleen Bergevin Brown would do her own organization of and research on the letters her father received. Artimesa, Denise, and Jeanne all completed their own research of their family's history and influence on the area. At some point one of the four sections of the original collection was discovered at an estate sale and added to Denise's split.

In 2012, Whitman College Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Sarah Hurlburt, began working with local artist and Bergevin descendant, J. Frank Munns, to research letters from Sister Marie Augustin to Mary Parmelia. Frank passed away January 9, 2013. At his funeral, Sarah met Denise, who introduced her to Colleen, who had become the family historian. Six months later, the library held a reception for the family where the split up letters were shared. The following day, Denise decided to donate her collection to the archives, and Colleen soon after. Eleonie Bergevin Remillard's granddaughter, Joan Patricia Remillard Yenny, also donated a package of letters.

Soon after her donation to the archives, Denise's daughter, Robin Ryan, found another box of letters written to Mary Parmelia. This box likely consisted of two packages of letters reconstituted from the original four-way split. With this final donation, and no obvious gaps in the collection that now exists, it is suspected that the archives house the entire original collection of letters inherited by Arthur.

Processing Note

Photocopied selections from books owned by Whitman College and one selection from a book owned by the Washington State Library were removed from the Artimesa Bergevin Pemberton papers. Photocopies of photographs of Louis and Celina Bergevin were also removed, as better copies of these photographs are included in the same series. The J. Frank Munns papers were weeded for duplicates. Original copies of the weeded letters can be found in the Colleen Bergevin Brown papers and Denise Bergevin Ryan O'Bryan papers. Any copies that included special annotations or previous drafts of translations remain.

Bibliography

Hurlburt, Sarah. "Kin Keeping and Family Storytelling in Nineteenth-century French-Canadian Immigrant Letters: The Bergevin Corpus." Histoire sociale/Social History 50, no. 102 (2017): 285-313. https://doi.org/10.1353/his.2017.0037.