Eastern Townships voices: The Ian Tait collection

By Jazmine Aldrich, with special thanks to Kevin Mancini and Anna-Karina Poronovich

The Eastern Townships Resource Centre (ETRC) is digging into its audio archives to discover fascinating testimonies of life in our region, in centuries past.

ETRC Archives Technicians Kevin Mancini and Anna-Karina Poronovich are undertaking an ambitious project to transcribe and describe hundreds of oral history interviews which were recently digitized thanks to grant funding provided by Library and Archives Canada through the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP). Though the two-year project aims to process over 700 audio and audio-visual recordings from different fonds and collections, it began with the oral histories found within the Ian Tait collection.

Ian Tait (1947-2005) was a beloved professor at Champlain Regional College in Lennoxville from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Tait was passionate about history, folklore, and folkways, dedicating much of his career to documenting traditional practices of the Townships through the recording of oral histories. As a professor, he also tasked his students with recording oral histories to further this research.

Following Ian Tait’s passing in 2005, his wife, Ginette Bernard, ensured the safekeeping of more than 400 audio tape cassettes by donating them to the ETRC Archives. Up until 2024, however, the only tool available to researchers to discover this fascinating collection was a list of interviewees and dates. Helpful as that finding aid was, it could not capture the full breadth and depth of these interviews.

The first step to making the interviews accessible was to digitize them. As the ETRC does not have the capacity to do this large-scale digitization work, the project was entrusted to the Société d’histoire et de généalogie Maria-Chapdelaine in Dolbeau-Mistassini, Quebec. The tapes made the journey of over 500 kilometers to be transformed into digital audio files which will be easier to preserve over the long term, as their physical carriers naturally degrade.

The first digitized files having been returned to the ETRC meant that it was time to listen. Enter: Kevin and Anna-Karina – two dedicated, recent graduates with a passion for history and the knowledge and desire to make it accessible to the public. Since September 2024, Kevin and Anna-Karina have been working full-time to transcribe these interviews and write descriptive summaries of their contents. The end goal of the project is to make the audio recordings, descriptions, and transcripts available to the public via the Eastern Townships Archives Portal – an online database for discovering the history of the Townships.

The ETRC’s Archives Technicians are being assisted in their work through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Kevin and Anna-Karina are using AI transcription software which takes digital audio files and produces a typed transcription. The Archives Technicians are then reviewing the transcripts and correcting them. While a great deal of human intervention is still required, this software makes a first pass to save time.

Through their work, Kevin and Anna-Karina have unearthed everything from the mundane facts to the extraordinary tales of life in the Townships. When prompted about his findings, Kevin shared that many of the interviews represent individuals from rural backgrounds who recount the rhythms of farming. These testimonies are particularly valuable because, as any farmer today would attest, there is not much time left at the end of the day to spend documenting their experiences. Often, the perspectives represented in archives are those of wealthy, urban folks with ample leisure time to document their lives; these interviews allow for the voice of the Townships farmer to be heard.

Kevin and Anna-Karina have regaled our team with entertaining and downright concerning home remedies including turpentine and sugar for a cough, coal oil mixed with maple sugar for a sore throat, and ingesting kerosene. All of these remedies fall into our unofficial classification of “do NOT try this at home!”

Kevin also noted the resiliency of the interviewees, describing the ways in which they preserved food, made their own goods, and handed down clothing. Though many of the interviewees are now deceased, their recollections of the region’s development and community-building bear witness to the very essence of this region.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, please contact the ETRC Archives.