Lögberg-Heimskringla - 28.01.2005, Blaðsíða 10

10 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Friday 28 January 2005
Keeping the
present alive
— and saving the past
Robert Ásgeirsson is semiretired, but he
wears many hats. He is the webmaster of the
lcelandic National League of North America.
He is the webmaster of the lcelandic Cana-
dian Club of British Columbia. He is in charge
of the lcelandic Archives of BC and he is the
producer of Ströndin Internet Radio, to name
a few duties. Steinþór Guðbjartsson man-
aged to see this busy man in BC.
PHOTO: STEINÞOR GUÐBJARTSSON
Robert Ásgeirsson with some of the pictures he has preserved
in the Icelandic Archives of BC.
Iam big on the ‘retired’ and
small on the ‘semi’,” Robert
Ásgeirsson says, eager to
change positions as he prepares
a publication of biographies of
people of Icelandic descent in
BC. He was bom in Winnipeg,
on the comer of Sargent and
Victor. His parents were Jo-
chum and Ingibjörg Lillian Ás-
geirsson. His father was bom
in Amgerðareyri by Isafjarðar-
djúp in Iceland and his mother
in Víðir, Manitoba.
Robert worked in the film
and television industry and
moved to BC in 1969. “I had
worked for CTV for five years
and had reached the level of
professionalism in Manitoba
where I just could not go any
further. The next move was
to go to the West Coast or to
Toronto and I fell in love with
Vancouver, which was then
poised to become ‘Hollywood
North’.”
Soon Robert joined the Ice-
landic Canadian Club of BC,
started working on the news-
letter and became president of
the club, a position he held for
a total of eight years over three
separate periods.
Interested in history
He is the curator of the Ice-
landic Archives of BC, which he
established in the mid-1980s.
“This started out as a per-
sonal interest on my part back
in the early ’70s, about a year
or two after I moved out here
from Manitoba,” Robert says.
“I had an idea to do research
for a potential film about New
Iceland. I wanted to produce a
documentary film about it, and
decided to go back to Mani-
toba to do some research. I
was looking for any kind of
photographic evidence from
the first years in the 1870s and
early 1880s. The INL Chap-
ters in the New Iceland area
graciously organized various
coffee parties for me. I man-
aged to copy a lot of old pho-
tographs showing the lifestyle,
that is, people working rather
than their portraits.
“After about a month’s
worth of work, I determined that
the earliest photographs were
really taken around the tum of
the century. I then made a deal
with the Manitoba Provincial
Archives to take over all my
copy negatives and place them
in their archives and in retum
they gave me a set of prints of
everything I managed to gather.
I then went back to BC and kind
of reviewed everything. I wrote
a proposal, and on a trip to Ice-
land I tried to interest people
there without much success. As
a result, I gave my prints to the
Gimli Museum in 1975.
“Although the project, now
deemed to be a film drama, was
too big for me to undertake, I
was still interested in doing his-
torical research, and it was then
that I started looking at the his-
tory of our people here in BC,
Some people would bring me
their old prints and trust me to
watch over them.
“On one occasion I got
about 780 photographs of Hunt-
er Island, collected by doctor E.
Júlíus Friðleifson. When I saw
his collection in the early ’70s,
I said to Júlíus that this was a
huge story of a group of people
who went from Iceland and
Vancouver to Hunter Island,
settled there in 1915, broke the
wildemess and made a life for
themselves there. It did not last
in the long run, but we have
photographs of the original
settlements in Smith Island and
Hunter Island.
“When various families in
the lower mainland heard that
I collected photographs, they
started to donate them to me
instead of throwing them away.
I started to get all kinds of his-
torical material, photos, papers
and other documents, and in
the mid-1980s I declared it as
a public collection. The Icelan-
dic Canadian club was gracious
enough to give us space in Ice-
land House to store the material
and that is where it is today.”
Although people of Icelan-
dic descent have not Iived in
BC for more than about a cen-
tury, a lot of their personal his-
tories are lost. A few years ago,
Robert started gathering biog-
raphies of local people to pre-
serve the existing knowledge.
“The propelling energy to
do this is the fact that many
people of Icelandic background
do not know people who were
around just 30 years ago, when
I first joined the club. The pur-
pose of this latest thrust in the
archives is to collect series of
biographies. Within the next
few months, we are going to
publish probably four hardcov-
er copies of detailed personal
histories.”
Last summer Robert started
a radio program on the Intemet
(www.pennan.ca/SIR/) with
the host Gus Kristjansson, who
is a retired professional broad-
caster. “‘Ströndin Intemet Ra-
dio’ is kind of an extension of
the archives,” he says. “What
I was hoping to do was to get
contemporary slices of life cap-
tured in more modern media. I
am hopeful that people across
North America might say one
day: If they can do it, we can do
it, and we can even do it better.
It would be wonderful if other
areas would do the same.”
A webmaster needed
Since 1996 Robert has
been the webmaster of the
INL (www.inlofna.org) and he
plans to retire from that in June
of next year. “It started out as
a simple thing — at a conven-
tion I said that we should have
a presence on the Internet and
I was elected to work on that
— but it has been growing and
growing,” he says. “My inten-
tion was to try to get at least a
single webpage for every one
of the organizations within the
INL, and although this was a lot
of work, the clubs are starting
to develop their own websites
now.”

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