Hong Kong Royal Asiatic Society: Sharon Oddie Brown
Tuesday November 22, 2012
The next speaker at the Royal Asiatic Society is an unusual
choice. She failed history in High School, and then steered clear of all such
courses at university. Fortunately, the lack of paper credentials has never
stopped her in the past. She has had a range of disparate careers: as a
Director of Outdoor and Environmental Studies for the YWCA, as the manager of a
bar that was profitable enough to pay off its mortgage, and as the author of a
book on home palliative care, Some Become
Flowers: Living with Dying at Home.
Aside from her professional work, Sharon has designed
several additions to buildings, including a four story circular tower. She
researched the engineering requirements, and drew up the blueprints. She and
her husband then did most of the construction work. This and other buildings she
has had a hand in either building or adding to are all still standing.
In the mid-1980s, she was elected twice as a Mission City
alderman. In that decade, she also became a good enough shot with a 22 rifle
that a bothersome bear took note and thereafter left her strawberries alone. In
the early 2000s, the volunteer financial and legal work she undertook in
Roberts Creek contributed – with the help of many others - to the first rural
cohousing community being successfully built in Canada. It came in under budget.
The history bug is one of her more recent obsessions. It was
triggered by an intricate, double-walled silver bowl that her grandmother had
smuggled into Canada in 1924. When Sharon’s father died in 1995, her curiosity about
why this bowl had been given to one of her ancestors led her to the story of
Sir Thomas Jackson and his brother David. Both men were her great- granduncles,
and both were key players in the early days of HSBC in Hong Kong and Japan.
Sharon’s curiosity also resulted in her finding seventy-seven
letters written by her great-great grandmother, letters that had once been lost
for decades in a bog in Ireland. It also led her to the tale of a gypsy telling
the fortunes of a man and a boy - one who would be known all over the world,
and the other who would die a dastardly death. The gypsy’s prediction is only
one of the many stories that she will relate at the Thursday evening talk. She
will also display more than a hundred family photos and have available copies
of several news clippings from the mid to late 1800s in the early days of the
Colony of Hong Kong.
Her web site and blog are visited by thousands of people on
a regular basis. Her method of research is idiosyncratic, but has recently been
given a name: crowd sourcing. This has
become an accepted method of historical research, since wedding the power of
the internet with collaborative sharing can clearly produce results that cannot
be realized in any other way. She has shared thousands of documents, photos and
articles on her web site and blog. If you ask her, she will confess that although
this approach requires an indecent amount of time and effort - it is also one
heck of a lot of fun and well worth the candle.
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