Former Canadian Senator Landon Pearson has donated the documents of her late husband, renowned diplomat Geoffrey Pearson, to Carleton’s library.
The Pearson family has a long-standing connection with Carleton, said Landon Pearson, who is the director of Carleton’s Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights.
Geoffrey Pearson was a diplomat and the son of former Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson. He is known for his three-year term as Canada’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, and for being president of the United Nations Association of Canada.
Pearson said she decided to donate the documents because both her husband and her father-in-law taught courses at Carleton.
Lester B. Pearson served as the university’s chancellor from 1969 until his death in 1972, she said.
She does not know the exact number of documents in the collection, but Pearson said there are “thousands of items,” including newspaper clippings, letters, and documents about foreign policy.
The donation contains documents about the Soviet Union, the United Nations, and the Suez Crisis, she said.
Geoffrey Pearson also gathered many of his father’s documents, so the collection contains the former prime minister’s letters and a diary he wrote when he was 18, she said.
“It’s more personal, but it’s sort of fun. It gives you some social history and a bit of his background. There’s even his marks from Peterborough high school,” she said.
“I guess it’s not very important in the grand scheme of things, but because they’re his, because of who he was, I think they’re quite valuable.”
The donation is a great resource for teaching and research, said Carleton’s head of archives and research collections Patti Harper.
“This collection has universal appeal to many different disciplines,” Harper said.
“So we have public policy, political science, and Canadian history. The list is endless of people who would be interested.”
Many professors have added archival projects to their curriculum, Harper said. Students can search through the documents through the archival website.
“When you’ve found a file that you like, it’s just a matter of letting us know, and we can pull that for you,” she said.
Pearson said she is happy to get the 35 boxes full of documents out of her house. It took her a year to organize the papers with the help of a Carleton student, she said.
“They were taking up a lot of space in my house,” she said. “I still have some more that I will add as time goes on because I did get through basically everything, but things keep turning up.”
