This paper emerges from a research project in history of education that is being developed in Portugal by a large group of researchers: “Education and Cultural Patrimony: schools, objects and practices”. Our contribution to this project is to study a private feminine school that functioned in a Portuguese northern village, Aveiro, between 1884 and 1910, under the Dominican Sisters’ direction. As far as we know this has been a very important school at the time for that region of the country as it was located in the centre of the city and was attended by a large range of people coming from different social levels: poor girls, middle-class girls and ancient local noble families’ daughters.

Although the school building has been transformed into a national museum there are just few traces of the ancient scholar activity in the museum’s archive. Even the actual museum workers have just a very slight idea of it. Looking for information, particularly primary sources, we found in the Dominican Sisters’ archive some letters concerning this school as well as some chronicle books, part of which written by the students themselves, newspapers, plans of the house, among others. Talking with several inhabitants we found out that some of them kept with their ancestors’ goods (mothers’, aunts’ or grandmothers’), a number of records from their school time. They even reported sorted episodes they had heard from them in the past. In the early 90’s of the last century we ourselves interviewed a very old lady that had been a student in this school and could add it now to the documents to be analyzed; this interview will be used as an example.

In this paper we intend to discuss some methodological issues about this kind of research depending mostly on memory and memories starting by questioning the concepts themselves.

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