Collection contains commonplace books, diaries, correspondence, etc., of the Gay, Worcester, Swanton, and Byram families. The majority of the material documents the home, family, and religious lives of several generations of Swedenborgians (members of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, or the...
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| Format: | Kit |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Colonial North American Project at Harvard University
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Electronic finding aid available |
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| Summary: | Collection contains commonplace books, diaries, correspondence, etc., of the Gay, Worcester, Swanton, and Byram families. The majority of the material documents the home, family, and religious lives of several generations of Swedenborgians (members of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, or the "New Church"), primarily in Gardiner, Maine, during the course of the 19th century. It also includes phrenological readings for two young children, documentation of a school for girls in New York City in the late 1840s, and diaries and letters describing anthropologist and ethnographer John Reed Swanton's work in the early 20th century with indigenous tribes in southeastern Alaska and the southwest United States Margaret (Lewis) Gay's commonplace book (ca.1759), which includes answers to questions such as "What are the Duties of Wives to their Husbands?," is the oldest document in the collection. The papers of her grandchildren include letters Laura (Gay) Davis wrote to her father and siblings while in Portugal between 1822 and 1824, and Olive (Gay) Worcester's diaries, written between 1829 and 1880. The Worcester papers include letters from Henry Worcester to his brother Joseph Emerson Worcester.The Swanton papers, spanning roughly the years 1875-1925, include family correspondence of Mary Olivia (Worcester) Swanton, and the correspondence of her son John and his wife Alice Barnard. Their correspondence and Alice Swanton's journals record some of the professional and personal satisfactions and hardships of their life on America's frontiers in the 1900s and 1910s |
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| Physical Description: | 4.38 linear feet (10 file boxes, 1 half file box, 2 folio folders, 1 photograph folder) |
| Access: | No restrictions on access copy Collection is open for research |
| Finding Aid: | Electronic finding aid available |