Retirement Reinvention by Robin Ryan

Author:Robin Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

PRESERVING HISTORY

Mary was a quiet, analytical lady who, until she was fifty-three, had a career doing data processing. By then her kids had graduated and she had the resources to go back to college. She got a graduate degree in library science and then worked for fourteen years as a librarian. She wouldn’t have left the job, but the library gave her a fairly big nudge to retire at age sixty-nine, so she did. She had no plans upon retirement and felt lost. A friend invited her to visit a Japanese garden about twenty miles away, for an afternoon, and she was impressed by its beauty. While she was there, she heard that the garden needed volunteers, particularly someone to work in the archive with historical materials about the garden and the family who started it.

Mary says, “I felt strongly that people need to know why this garden is even here. History should be written down.” She signed up to become the garden’s archivist—developing the collection of historical documents and maintaining that information online.

“I wanted to be in charge of the archives,” Mary says. “My volunteer job began by receiving boxes of papers, news clippings, and some information that I needed to make sense of and to recreate the history. I’ve enjoyed it. The work is meaningful and rewarding. Others will know about this special place and where it came from.”

Mary pointed out that many historical nonprofits cannot afford to hire an archivist, so if you like history, detective work, and organizing and piecing things together, work like this might be a good fit for you and your talents.

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