Chris’s collection served another function for him besides simply being the material evidence of a life richly lived. His archive was the material manifestation of his memories. Letters and notebooks and photographs and other documents became sites of his memory, testimony to, first, the physical, mental, and emotional challenges of migration, and, second, the new life he had constructed and nurtured in Canada.

Through the letters he wrote back home, for example, he shared his experiences and simultaneously reinforced his memory. Letters sent to him also embodied memories, the memory of a mother he would not see again for years, of friends and schoolmates who had embarked on their own life journeys, and of the small village where his life began. Thus, his memories, his very identity, became intricately and intimately bound up with his letters and the other elements in his collection.

So, these aerogrammes and cards, postcards and photographs, marriage certificates and work diaries, and thousands of other objects are Chris’s memories in physical, tangible form. This
makes their careful accumulation and preservation a crucial part
of hislife experience. He could not simply throw away his past, any more than a museum could dispose of its collections.