Ed never got to meet his father. His mother, Ellen Soars Shields, was five months pregnant with Ed in 1926 when his missionary father died suddenly. (His father’s first wife, Frances Elizabeth Davis Shields, also died young, leaving three children.)
“I always wondered what he was like,” Ed says of his father, Edgar Shields, Class of 1901, whom Ed’s aunt described as “full of life, fun and laughter.”
In recent years, the 92-year-old engineer from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, has been drawn even closer to his father by plunging into the task of organizing the missionary’s voluminous collection of photographs and memorabilia from China.
“This has been a way of him getting to know his father better,” says Ed’s son, Tom Shields ’82, an associate professor of English at East Carolina University.
The daunting process of preserving the collection has become a family affair, with Ed taking the lead and receiving help from the next generation, including his son Tom, and his niece, Ellen Shields Wilch ’81. Assisting the family is Joseph Ho, an assistant professor of history who met the family when he joined Albion College. During a 2017 new-faculty retreat, Wilch’s husband, Thomas, who teaches geology at Albion, met Ho and discovered that his research specialty is interpreting visual records of American missionaries in China.
The Shields collection will be housed at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. Ed already digitized most of the letters, diaries and glass-plate images, while Ellen is working with Ho to create high-resolution scans of hundreds of photographs. In addition to the China photos, the collection includes an album of 1901 Bucknell photographs.
“None of us in the family really understood the importance of this collection to scholars of Chinese history,” says Ellen, a geneticist who lives in Albion, Mich. “We are all thrilled that these pictures and letters will be accessible to historians as well as to family members.”
In a few years, many more people will know the story of how a young graduate left Bucknell at the start of the 20th century for a life of purpose a world away. — Jennifer Linz
Right: The Shields family in early 20th-century China. From left: Bessie and Edgar with their children William and Ruth, and Edgar’s sister Esther.
Bottom: The Shields family in early 20th-century China. From left: Bessie and Edgar with their children William and Ruth, and Edgar’s sister Esther.