Today I'm hoping to finish transcribing all the letters about Louise D at the Ontario School for the Blind around 1904. She's French-Catholic and I talk about how she becomes the hub that attracts other French-Catholic children to come to the English-Protestant school. #Dishist
The religious teachings at these schools are important - when I was writing about the school for the Deaf in Halifax I learned that the new Catholic bishop there demanded that parents not send their Catholic & Deaf children there because they might become protestants.
He argued that it was better that kids never go to school or learn Sign Language than risk them becoming protestants. (The language was Maritime Sign Language, not ASL - MSL is now considered a "dead" language although there are still some people who use it.)
Anyway, after Louise comes to the school, a few other French Catholics start to appear. Louise herself writes to the school one summer to ask that Malvina be accepted - she's French, Catholic, and partially deaf as well as blind. Malvina spends several years at the school...
and the letters to & from her parents make clear that she really only settled in with Louise's help. There are also other French-speaking students from other parts of the country that end up at the school in part because Louise is there & can be a poster child of sorts for them.
While it seems that occasionally the children spoke French amongst themselves, it's clear that this was rare and they were mostly required to speak English at school. At one point Louise writes back about how she met Malvina at the train station in North Bay and...
Malvina struggled a bit to settle back into French after a term of speaking only (or mostly) English.
As an adult, Louise became a music teacher and lived with her sister. I'm not sure of her degree of blindness, though - I know she gets surgery in Montreal to help...
but it's not clear how much it actually helps. I think Louise has a scribe that writes for her (sometimes her sister and sometimes someone else) because she still references borrowing raised print text books & mentions how much her eyes hurt, and for some other reasons.
This is part of the interesting thing about trying to trace blind people in the 19th/early 20th centuries. What we mean by "blind" has changed (because ww1 & returning war-blinded veterans) - I would certainly have gone to a school for the blind in 1904 but obviously not now.
(As well as obviously improvements in treatment & technology!) So Bertha can write her own letters without much difficulty while still being "blind" for the purposes of her education & career prospects (but not in the census for various reasons), while Louise...
clearly has difficult in reading print & is ALWAYS listed in the census as blind - she's super easy to trace. (Her career as a blind music teacher is not unusual either - she does a career that is acceptable for a Nice Blind Lady, whereas as @sara_spike alluded to...
Bertha has a farm wife/busy mother of 7 children doesn't "look" blind to the census enumerator.)

All of this is a lead up to my favourite sentence written by one of girls & women I'm writing about right now:
"Hoping you will forgive the delay I am taking in returning your music, for I do not mean to invite the name of “bookkeeper” upon myself."
I just love the term "bookkeeper" as someone who doesn't return library books on time. #me
I can't return my library books right now because of the crows and thus literally have two full shelves of library books. #bookkeeper
I have a library book problem. I can't wait to be done so I can return them. And also for the pandemic to be over.
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