After taking her first history class at Memorial University in 1978, Linda White decided she wanted to change her life.

Born and raised in St. John’s, she graduated from the Grace Hospital as a registered nurse in the late 1960s and moved to Los Angeles to work. She would later go on to practice in Vancouver and England.

But in 1978, she returned to St. John’s because she wanted to upgrade her training and earn a bachelor of nursing degree at Memorial.

It was a practical plan, and since she had been away from school for some time, she decided that it would also be practical to take some electives in her first year.

That’s how she fell in love with the study of history.

Ms. White’s career path took a new direction as she changed course and went on to complete her bachelor’s degree in history. Then in 1992, she completed her thesis – a labour history of nursing in Newfoundland and Labrador – and earned her master’s degree as well.

With her freshly printed graduate degree, she accepted a position at Memorial’s Queen Elizabeth II Library in St. John’s. She’s been working in the archives ever since.

From day one, Ms. White even spent her spare time in the archives, compiling notes towards a history of Greenspond – her parents’ hometown.

This work led to the creation of the Greenspond Letter, a quarterly journal dedicated to the history of the community and surrounding region. Ms. White worked as the writer, editor and publisher of the journal from 1994 to 1997 when she helped found the Greenspond Historical Society, which then took over publication of the magazine.

The Greenspond Letter has been published for over thirty years and stands as a shining example of the resources available through Memorial’s Archives and Special Collections.

 

Linda White holds one end of a 100-year diary discovered in the Michael Harrington Collection in the archives. The diary is printed on a single sheet of paper and is nearly 12 meters long. Photo from the Gazette.

 

Ms. White won the Student Volunteer Bureau’s Faculty/Staff Volunteer of the Year Award in 2000 for her contributions to the Newfoundland Historical Society, the Greenspond Historical Society and the Gower Street United Church Archives.

In 2018, she won the Outstanding Heritage Supporter Award, presented during the Historic Sites of Newfoundland and Labrador Manning Awards, for her work on the Greenspond Letter.

Ms. White has catalogued numerous collections at the archives and continues the Herculean task of cataloguing the massive Joseph R. Smallwood Collection, one of the jewels in the archives’ crown.

And true to her roots, she has spent years building the archives’ collection of nursing documents, making it the primary source for documents related to the history of nursing in the province.

She says the biggest change during her time with the archives has been the advent of the internet. The staff now responds to research requests from all over the world on a daily basis.

Over the years, she has assisted countless faculty members, students and members of the public navigate the university’s impressive archival resources, making a consistent behind-the-scenes contribution to the study of the province’s history.

But she has also made a significant contribution in her own right, writing numerous articles that both contribute to our knowledge of history and promote the seemingly inexhaustible resources available to researchers at the archives.

For Ms. White, the archives are a place of discovery and wonder and the place where she is most at home and in her element. “Some people knit and sew,” she said. “I go to the archives to research.”