About the Collection:
Our Mission
The Operation Babylift Collection exists to preserve, protect, and return the earliest histories of Vietnamese children evacuated during the final days of the Vietnam War. Our mission is to reunite adoptees with their original records, honor the caregivers and communities who carried them, and safeguard this complex chapter of history with truth, dignity, and compassion. Through careful archival stewardship, storytelling, and community engagement, we work to bring these stories home—while the people who lived them are still here to share their voices.
Your support makes this possible. It ensures that fragile records are preserved, that histories are returned to the individuals they belong to, and that voices at risk of being lost are heard, respected, and remembered.
Stewardship & Origins
The Collection’s Guardian: Sister Mary Nelle Gage
Sister Mary Nelle Gage is a member of the Sisters of Loretto and a longtime advocate for children displaced by war. During and after the Vietnam War, she worked closely with Friends For All Children, helping to coordinate care, adoption efforts, and long-term support for Vietnamese children evacuated during Operation Babylift. For decades, Sister Mary Nelle safeguarded adoption records, correspondence, and personal files connected to these children, recognizing their lifelong importance. Her stewardship, care, and insistence on ethical responsibility have been central to preserving these histories and ensuring they are returned to adoptees with dignity and compassion.
The Accidental Archivist: Devaki Murch
Devaki Murch is an Operation Babylift crash survivor who became an archivist by necessity rather than design. Trained as an event director, she spent her career building experience until access to her own adoption records, and more than thirty-three boxes of Friends For All Children files changed the course of her work. Now an “accidental archivist,” Devaki is stewarding fragile, dispersed records tied to Vietnamese adoptees, caregivers, and veterans, learning archival practice in real time while centering care, ethics, and lived experience. Her work focuses on returning original histories to the people they belong to and preserving this chapter of history with dignity, compassion, and accountability.
A Framework for Care: Love Ethic Archive Practice (LEAP)
The Love Ethic Archive Practice (LEAP) emerges from bell hooks’ articulation of love as an active, accountable practice. It is grounded in care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Applied to archives, LEAP reframes record stewardship as a relational process rather than a neutral transaction, centering the lived impact of records on the people they describe. It draws from archival science, trauma-informed care, ethics, oral history, design, and community organizing, allowing the practice to grow collaboratively as new disciplines inform how records are preserved, contextualized, and returned. LEAP is not a fixed methodology but an evolving framework that is shaped by archivists, storytellers, legal advisors, historians, and community members working together to protect vulnerable histories while honoring the people still living within them.
Building Long-Term Care & Access
Today, StoryScope Studio operates under fiscal sponsorship from Torrey House Press and is in discussions with Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center regarding permanent collection placement. Sister Mary Nelle remains an active advisor, championing the community-centered approach she helped pioneer.
