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All geography is historical geography. There is no better way to weaken our scholarly power than to engage in presentism, either by ignoring or by discounting the past. It is equally problematic to engage in historicism, however, as though the past can be excavated for its own sake. The present is but the past becoming. Answering the charge from the AAG's Historical Geography Specialty Group organizers to reflect on the significance of archival work for historical geographers, I have divided this discussion into three sections, which roughly coincide with my own trajectory from graduate school, through an early, and now a late, academic career. Although that trajectory is roughly chronological, it is also a journey of a changing relationship with archives, and with the people whose lives are archivally represented. This article begins with my research in a Japanese village during the early 1980s, proceeds to discuss the formation of a career based on studying the development of Japanese-Canadian communities, and concludes with a brief description of current collaborative work in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver.