At the boundary: the Sisters of the Holy Cross and their own archive

1843–present — the Congregational Archives at Saint Mary's

The sisters' cameras: Saint Mary's College stands with Notre Dame in the unincorporated community across the city line, and it is printed here at the same boundary size. The Congregational Archives and Records of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, kept on the Saint Mary's campus, hold the photographic record of the sisters' own work across two centuries — including the relief missions by which the congregation is known worldwide. In the college's Displacement Project (2019–2021), a faculty-student team digitized and exhibited the archive's letters and photographs of displaced peoples across four conflicts: the American Civil War, the Cambodian refugee crisis of 1979–80, the civil war in Lebanon of 1982–84, and the civil war in El Salvador of 1983–87. The college's visual history has itself been published from the archive: Amanda Divine's Saint Mary's College (2001) draws nearly two hundred images from the Saint Mary's College Archives for the college's first exclusively visual history of its hundred fifty years. The University of Notre Dame Archives holds a companion Sisters of the Holy Cross Collection (1846–1979). No sister or staff photographer is named in the records reached — the congregation's photography, like the companies', survives as an institutional archive rather than as credited work, and it is printed at exactly that size.

Sources:

1. Saint Mary's College, "The Displacement Project: Archival Storytelling and the Sisters of the Holy Cross" (humanitiesforall.org) — the Congregational Archives and Records on the college campus; the 2019–21 digitization and exhibition of letters and photographs from the Civil War, Cambodian (1979–80), Lebanon (1982–84) and El Salvador (1983–87) relief work.
2. Amanda Divine, Saint Mary's College (Arcadia, 2001) — nearly 200 images from the Saint Mary's College Archives; the college's first exclusively visual history.
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, ArchivesSpace — Sisters of the Holy Cross Collection (identifier SCS), 1846–1979.