During Customs Week in the fall of 2009, I remember being bombarded with all sorts of information intended to guide  me as I embarked on my 4-year journey. I promptly forgot the bits of advice that I considered pointless (who cares about having a balanced class schedule or knowing all the important academic deadlines of the semester?) and focused on counsel that struck me as the most instructive, e.g. the low down on the locations and nuances of all the vending machines on-campus, the inside scoop on the best place to buy socks in Suburban Square and the list of unofficial graduation requirements (any Quakers in need of a black eye, or info about the Friendly Association Papers, should contact me at akhan@haverford.edu).

A few days ago, I was musing on how the list needs to be updated with new requirements.  That same day, while idly browsing the records of the class of 1915 in the History of Haverford College section on triptych, I came across an article that provided me with the idea for one such requirement (did Special Collections read my mind? Far-fetched, but possible) :

The article reports the suspension of six Haverford seniors after they were caught serenading beneath the windows of a Bryn Mawr dorm at midnight. I was more than a little amused when the article noted that “there was an intimation that the singing was off-key” and the suspension infringed on “the unalienable right of college men to sing college songs on their way home from class gatherings”.

The thought that the article was a hoax never crossed my mind until I read the alleged telegram exchange between the presidents of the two colleges presented as exhibits. It seems scarcely believable that president of Bryn Mawr would send her telegrams from “the beanery” and would sign off as Emma Scarey. It seemed even less likely that M. Carey Thomas, a prominent suffragist from the early 20th century, would complain to President Sharpless that her “poor dear lambs were disturbed….much to the detriment of their needed beauty sleep”. There are numerous other gems embedded in the article that indicate this article is a century-old precursor to the Bi-Co (on A Budget) website.

There’s also a possibility that the article itself is chronicling an event that really happened but the telegrams are fabricated to poke fun at the administration in a more subtle way than this comic that follows the article:

In any case, I’m inspired by the antics- real or imagined- of the class of 1915 and I will endeavor to copy them towards the end of my senior year in order to be considered truly worthy of graduating from this great institution.

Triptych contains a wealth of such material and I urge readers to go on a treasure hunt and find similar gems from the college archives. It’s a much better procrastination tool than facebook, which is evil incarnate anyway.

In a drawer filled with folders of meeting house images, I found a  folder with four  images of Burlington Meeting House.  Three of the drawings (pictured in the thumbnails below) appear to be drawings of the  first meeting house built in 1683.  This meeting is unusual because it is hexagonal.  Throughout my time with meeting houses (and regular houses too), I have seen many rectangular and square ones, but very few hexagonal ones.  I have not been able to find any information about why they built such an oddly shaped meeting house.

Unfortunately, this unusual meeting house met its end in the 1780s, when another meeting house was built in close proximity to it.

The fourth image is a little mysterious.  I assumed when I was scanning it that it was a plan for the new Burlington Meeting House.  So I took a look at images of the building on Triptych.  I soon realized that I was wrong.  Some digging did not get me very far, which is not surprising considering that the plan is undated.  Hoping to find out more about the person who drew the plans, I tried to find information on Wm. Dillwyn.  From what I could find out, he was born in Philadelphia, and married his first wife in Burlington, NJ.  However, he lived in England when the new meeting house was built, so he may or may not have submitted this plan.  It is also possible that there was another William Dillwyn living in the area at the time.

Even without knowing the exact history of the plan, it was really interesting to see the detailed notes and drawings for a meeting house, which is something I had not come across before this image.

Regardless of the roadblocks, trying to figure out this architectural mystery was quite enjoyable.  It’s just too bad that there seems to be no clear answer.

For more images of Burlington Meeting House, check out Triptych.

A few days ago, Patrick and I were going through a box in the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine Jones Cadbury papers entitled “Bound genealogical and family records,”  which contains both Balderston (Catharine’s side) and Cadbury genealogical information. We came across a book about Catharine’s grandfather, Lloyd Balderston, written by two of his children, Anne and Lloyd, Jr. In the back of the book, four envelopes addressed to Catharine Jones Cadbury are pasted in the back cover, containing photographs, letters, and a handwritten family tree of Catharine Canby Balderston, the matriarch of the Balderston family and Catharine Cadbury’s grandmother.

Yellow with age, this family tree traces the Canby line all the way back to William the Conqueror and “Saint” David of Scotland. I almost didn’t believe this tree could be accurate until I spent some time researching each link drawn so thoughtfully on the piece of hundred-year-old paper. It turns out that William Warder Cadbury married, perhaps unsuspectingly, into royalty!

I reached back into my memory of freshman year Western Civ and realized that this family tree practically told the story of English history. With names like Empress Matilda of Germany, King John Lackland, the Magna Carta Barons, and even Elizabeth Griscom (better known as Betsy Ross) jumping off the page, I knew this was a very special document. I decided to look up birth, death, and marriage dates when I could find them, and continued adding to the Canby-Balderston line down to people living today to give a more complete picture of this incredible family.

Throughout history, as loyalties changed, religion also often changed. I wondered when Quakerism was introduced in this family, so I looked through the Dictionary of Quaker Biography for two last names that I suspected might have Quaker roots: Claypoole and Griscom. The Claypooles were among the first people to come to America, starting in 1682 on the Amity. James Claypoole, the great-great-great-great-great grandfather of Catharine Jones Cadbury, came to America from London in 1683 on the Concord with his wife, Helena Mercer. James and Helena were married in 1657 in Germany by a Calvinist minister, which means that they were not affiliated with Quakerism at that time, since upon marrying a non-Quaker, the Quaker would be swiftly separated from the faith. I turned again to the DQB to see if it had an answer for me, and sure enough it turns out that James was “Convinced before 1660,” which means he was, as far as I can find out, the first Quaker of the family. It seems as though James and Helena raised their children Quaker as well, since the subsequent generations are also all part of the faith.

Going a little farther down the line, in 1783 Catharine Jones Cadbury’s great-great grandfather, John Claypoole, marries a woman by the name of Elizabeth Griscom–better known to most of us as Betsy Ross. Elizabeth was also raised Quaker, but the DQB tells us that her first marriage to John Ross, an episcopalian, caused her to be separated. After John’s death, though, she rejoined the Quaker faith as a Free Quaker, supporting the war against England. Her later marriage to John Claypoole resulted in the continuation of the Quaker lineage until eventually Catharine Jones Cadbury married into another quite prominent Quaker family, the Cadburys.

Any questions or comments about this post or any of the work Patrick and I do can be sent to either deannaelizabethbailey@gmail.com or hc-special@haverford.edu.

As you may already know, Haverford’s Special Collections has a wealth of material, from Quaker family papers to fine art to rare books. Because of this, our jobs here in the library often involve working with a variety of material. Though my primary project this summer is all about the Morris-Shinn-Maier collection, I have also begun working on the preservation of photos from the Hurley-Waring collection.
Though only part of my side project, these photographs are absolutely fascinating. The photographs were taken by Alston Waring, as he and his wife, Beulah Hurley, traveled around the world. There are about 10 photo albums, and they include locations all over Europe and Asia.

The photographs that have interested me the most from this collection are images Alston Waring took while they were in Paris, France. I took a trip to Paris only last summer with my mother, and going through these photos feels almost like a strange déjà-vu; I saw (and took my own pictures of) so many of the same things when I was in Paris, yet Alston and Beulah were there in 1918!

The more photos I came across of sites I visited, the more simultaneously similar and different our visits seemed. This thought led me to the idea of comparing our trips through their photographs of 1918 Paris and images of Paris today.

The first difference in our trips is that, while I made it to France on an Icelandair flight, Alston and Beulah came aboard the S.S. Rochambeau.

Once in Paris, I took to the streets, eager to experience Paris. I know that Alston and Beulah did as well, because in their photo album this image:  has the caption, “Early morning on the boulevards.” Though I’m sure we all enjoyed the experience, my walk through the Parisian streets looked quite different:

I know Alston and Beulah saw many of the same things my mother and I saw (as well as countless other tourists between us and since), because their albums are full of  old black-and-white versions of photos I might have taken. Alston has a couple images, titled “Flower-mart in Old Paris.”

They reminded me clearly of vendors I saw, selling books and posters along the banks of the Seine river:

One of my favorite parts of the trip with my mother was the day that we took a walking tour of Montmartre. We walked all the way up through the narrow and hilly streets, stopping to window shop and try baguettes which were voted the best in France. When we arrived at the very top, we stood with crowds of other tourists to gaze up at the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur and out over Paris.

Last summer, Montmartre

and the Basilica looked

something like this,

but in the Hurley-Waring photo collection,

I found this photo,  in which the

Basilica looks almost lonely.

I love Special Collections because of the opportunity to have experiences like this, in which I feel a fond familiarity with the material while at the same time every photograph is novel and fascinating.

For more information on this collection, or any other material here, please email hc-special@haverford.edu or (even better!) come visit us in person.

So I have been working on cataloging the books in the Rufus Jones Study in the Philips Wing,  and I have been discovering some really interesting material. And I’m not just talking about the wide variety of fascinating books in there, but all the things I’ve been finding INSIDE the books!!!!

(I thought this was really cool!)

One of the first items I found was bookmark from circa 1915, which is promoting an insurance policy that covers injuries to one’s servants, along with damages caused by civil insurrection, subterranean fires, and riots and strikes.

(Ain’t that the darndest thing?)

Another item I found should be of great interest to those who have recently completed applying to colleges: it is an old letter of recommendation/transcript from the Principal of the Friends School to “The President of Yale” (clearly this was a lot more informal process back in the day!):

(“This is to certify that Frank P. Pickley[?], has graduated at this school in the present class. That he is in our judgement reasonably well prepared on the following studies for your Freshman Class at Yale College….[list of classes taken]“.)

(“…He has completed these reasonably well. His moral character is very good. He has been with us several years, Augustine Jones, Principal of Friends School, June 28, 1888″)

So there you have it. A letter of recommendation from 1888, and a currently politically incorrect insurance policy. I’ve really enjoyed going through this library and finding these gems. It makes me feel like a treasure hunter, but the value is that it is so interesting!

In the coming weeks, I will post some more of my discoveries! In the meantime, my email is kmoll@haverford.edu.

If you need an excellent resource for histories of Quaker meeting houses, T. Chalkley Matlack’s notebooks are well worth a look.  He compiled a vast amount of information concerning  meeting houses in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and a few other places.  Matlack’s project is impressive to say the least.  Each hand-written notebook provides the histories and photographs of meeting houses in a specific state, county, etc.

He best explained his reasons for writing in the introduction to his first notebook:

“During the passage of the early days of 1928 the idea of collecting photographic views of Friends’ Meeting Houses took hold of the mind of the compiler of this work.  The gathering together of pictures of Meeting Houses in the form of post-cards, photographs, or drawings, had often been tried by others with in some cases, very admirable success, yet quite incomplete, irregular in size, and without written detail of the meetings they illustrated.  In planning the collection here under consideration, the compiler designed to personally visit each meeting locality, if possible to reach it, and not only secure photographs of the Meeting House from more than one point of approach, but to add, others of the environment, often very attractive and beautiful, the school houses… , the boarding homes…, and the burial grounds….  Another, and probably the most important feature of the project, was to gather historical data concerning each meeting.  This part of the work gradually developed into a search among meeting records, histories, and various writings bearing upon the subject.  The deeper the research the more intense became the interest.  Many persons assisted with personal knowledge and recollections that were especially interesting, helpful and valuable… This collection of Friends Meeting Houses comprises the history of 267 meetings; and pictures 219 localities visited by the compiler. T.Chalkley Matlack, Moorestown, New Jersey, Twelfth Mo. 1st, 1933.”

There are 21 notebooks in the collection, and each one communicates the time and effort that Matlack put into them.  After scanning and trying to document many pictures of meeting houses with very little information included, Matlack’s notebooks were a wonderful change: each meeting house is given more than a name or date, it is given a context too.  The  notebooks are very thorough.  The histories are informative and, in some cases,  contain  amusing anecdotes about the meeting houses.

For more information about this collection, please visit the Finding Aid.

The collection is currently available at Special Collections.  Hopefully, it will also be available on Triptych in the near future!

I already did a blog post this week, but I just had to post about this really nifty interaction I had online. I had been looking through some work that previous interns had done cataloging letters and stuff, and I had decided to start doing research on selected names of correspondents after finding a letter blandly labeled as “William J. Bryan” without reference to the fact that this was in fact from William Jennings Bryan, a giant of American politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anyway, I had googled a specific piece of information that also happened to be in the wording of the finding aid, and I ran across the following post.

So cool, right? Me and my friend Google Translate teamed up and translated this (it’s in traditional Chinese so I apologize if anything is wrong–not my forte):
——————————————-
Chapter revised translation from the start; it took two weeks. Yesterday, I finally completed the thirty-second chapter (the last chapter).

Among them those who stayed in Guangzhou, I noticed that one Dr. Cadbury, was He Aide’s pastor and that Cadbury wife is one of Dr. He Aide relatives. I did not know who he is, and I did not know he was a doctor or a Ph.D. But yesterday, I suddenly remembered the earlier interlibrary loan book ’1918 Pandemic of Influenza in Canton ‘ that I had read; did a Dr. Cadbury not write it? At lunch time today I looked it up on google, and it really was.

——————————————-
It was during my time at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) when I had found the “Century of the Boji Hospital!” I remember that book is prefaced by the famous Taiwanese politician and former mayor of Guangzhou, Sun Fo!

Reference: Li Chuanbin the 20th century, the cause of Christianity in China Medical Research, “Southern Studies Forum (Nanyang Normal College of Humanities and Social Science)” 2006 (4):

…
Hospital history book of the church are: on the Guangzhou Boji Hospital “Boji Hospital century history” (William Warder Cadbury and Mary Hoxie Jones, At the Point of A Lancet: One Hundred Years of the Canton Hospital 1835-1935, Shanghai: 1935 .),…

——————————————-
It turns out that it really is a small world. My public health research and the study of the history are actually related! Everything is connected with everything!

The question now is what is William Cadbury’s Chinese name?
——————————————-

I just had to respond!

Everything is connected with everything! I could not agree more. His post idly wondering what Dr. Cadbury’s Chinese name reached literally the only person on the entire planet who actually knew! The internet and globalization have created a web of knowledge where archives that used to be arcane repositories of papers have become these interactive banks of accessible knowledge that surpass language and geographical barriers. It’s really amazing!

In the Morris-Shinn-Maier collection, there was a box of photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century. There were around 300 snapshots, as well as 60 or so “cartes de visite” and “cabinet cards,” which are types of formal photographs taken in the 19th century. This is quite exciting, because they were in excellent condition, and the snapshots showed everyday life, rather than the posed photos that often survive from that time period.
However, they are nearly useless to scholars.
Almost none of the photographs have any information about what they depict. Around 8 out of the cabinet cards and cartes de visite have the person in the photograph identified. Only 5 of the snapshots have information on them–landscapes which just have their location on them.

Here are two of the unidentified prints. Wouldn’t you like to know who these people are, where they were, what they were doing?

This is truly a tragedy. There are fascinating photographs in this collection, photos which likely have historical value, photos which seem to long to tell a story. The stories behind these photographs have been lost to history, and that’s a real shame.
For this reason, I encourage all of you to label your photographs! Make sure that people in the future can look at a photo and understand why you decided that at that exact moment, you needed to preserve your surroundings forever. Facebook is wonderful for this, as are digital photos in general–facial recognition software can use one identified photo to match up with others. However, the boxes of old snapshots in your basement? Go through those now, before you forget who’s in them or pass away, and your kids, relatives or (if you’re a member of an old Quaker family) I have to go through all of them and decide what to do with them.
There are a number of fairly simple ways to go through photographs. For one, throw away out-of-focus shots, duplicates, shots where your finger is over the lens, or shots where everyone’s eyes are closed. Keep the ones you would want to look at in the future. Secondly, even if you don’t label each individual person in every photograph, label the most important people and those who appear in many photographs. Finally, even dates and locations can be very helpful.
Follow these tips, and in a hundred years, you won’t be frustrating summer students working in the archives of some college or another.

As I was flipping through a box cataloging some materials, I ran across a letter that made me pause for a seconds. Sandwiched between a few Christmas cards and a few letters from the Cadbury’s adopted son was a letter from Rose Hum Lee. The name was familiar enough to make me pause for a second and Google it before moving on.

A quick check of Wikipedia scholarly publications told me that Rose Hum Lee was an important twentieth century sociologist who was one of the leading voices of the Chicago school. She was the first woman and the first Chinese-American to head an academic department, and she was the foremost advocate of the assimilationist approach towards integration of racial minorities. Essentially, she was the most articulate proponent of the still very present idea that racial minorities must adopt an American identity and cast off affiliations with their previous cultures. The Wikipedia journal article redirected me to some of the books I had used on my thesis on Chinese-white intermarriage, specifically one on the development of the Chicago school of thought and its research on intermarriage. This book, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America by Henry Yu, had a whole chapter on Dr. Lee’s work based on her daughter’s collection of her papers now at UCLA.

Rose Hum Lee

Yu writes that much of Dr. Lee’s work was based off of her on own experience growing up as the daughter of well to do merchants in Butte, Montana.

“Lee often used her own family, and especially her mother, as examples of the successful assimilation of Chinese- Americans. Her dissertation’s appendix contained an extended life history of the Hums, and she often referred to her family’s experiences to illustrate analytical points. Interestingly, however, all descriptions of her family and herself were cloaked in anonymity. Lee would quote from “Private Document No. 17, Life History No. 1” as if it was just another nameless, faceless piece of sociological data.” [1]

Dr. Lee’s own personal life also shows through in her feminist spin on racial and cultural assimilation. In Lee’s eyes, forcing Chinese immigrants to give up their cultural identity to a larger American one was a way to break with the feudalistic treatment of women that had for so long been an element of Chinese family structure.

“After graduating from high school in 1921 and briefly attending the local college in Butte, she married Ku Young Lee, a China-born engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania. She went with him to China after his graduation, living mainly in Canton for nearly a decade. The marriage eventually dissolved. In 1939, Rose Hum Lee returned to the United States with an adopted Chinese daughter, determined to pursue a career as a writer, teacher, and social worker…

Lee’s marriage and life in China had been a torment for her. She was unable to conceive a child, and her husband’s family constantly criticized her failure to carry out what they felt was a woman’s reproductive duty. Her final break with her husband and return to America can be seen not only as a repudiation of what she understood as the traditional roles of Chinese womanhood but also as an idiosyncratic attempt at Americanization. Lee’s commitment to the assimilation cycle was reaffirmed as she left behind everything negative that she associated with China. The path from China to America, for Lee, was the same path from traditional women’s work to a modern, emancipated womanhood.” [2]

The correspondence between her and Dr. Cadbury, however, seems to veer slightly from Dr. Yu’s interpretation. Dr. Cadbury and Dr. Lee could have met during any point during her ten year stint in Canton, and likely met several times because they existed in the same small privileged Anglophone circles. However, it is most likely that they spent the most time together from 1937-1939, the period of Dr. Lee’s involvement in the Canton Red Cross Women’s War Relief program headed up by none other than director of the Canton Red Cross, William Warder Cadbury.

The letter to Dr. Cadbury highlight many things I did not know about Mrs. Lee including that she was active in Friend’s circles, AFSC particularly. The most interesting part of this letter is her note concerning Japanese attacks. Here is the letter and the excerpt:

————–

“I have been wondering about the situation in Hong Kong, as the radio reports come through. If the Japanese take this port, many of our friends are affected including my husband and my family. I hope they have all gone elsewhere for safety.”
———————-

Although this does not necessarily disprove Dr. Yu’s point, it certainly portrays Dr. Lee and her (former) husband’s relationship in a different light. At what could have been the apogee of her dislike of Ku Young Lee and his family, she appears concerned for his safety and the safety of his family. She maintains the affinal terms that once bounded the two’s relationship; in this letter he is still her husband and his family still her family.

This alternate perspective suggests any number of things, from a simple difference in audience (Dr. Yu’s work is based on letters from Dr. Lee to her daughter while this letter to a friend addresses a very different perspective) to possibly more important conclusions such as a stronger continued relationship between Dr. Lee and her former husband. In the end, I haven’t read enough of her papers to directly draw these conclusions. Despite this, I think this letter is an interesting addendum to Dr. Lee’s body of papers, and I sent off an e-mail to the UCLA library to see if they want a scan of it.

[1] Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126

[2] Ibid., 129-130

This week, I’ve been feverishly adding to the skeleton that is the Archivists’ Toolkit version of the WWC finding aid—so feverishly, in fact, that the details of each letter I copy and paste often blur together as they whiz by my eyes on the screen, jumping from their home in Microsoft Word to land safely in their fresh new digs in AT. At this point in processing a collection, I’m always torn between reading every letter’s description in order to really get to know the materials and actually getting some work done. The latter usually wins out, but a few key phrases caught my attention earlier this week, so I let my curiosity get the better of me, if only for the benefit of this blog post.

I stumbled across this description of a September 1912 letter from William Warder Cadbury to his parents: “Sara’s condition has worsened considerably.” Reading it felt almost like a dream—thrust into the middle of the action, not knowing how or why you got there in the first place—so I went to the beginning of the folder of letters and did some background research. I pulled the letter to see what was happening and found out that, in fact, Sara Imbrie Manatt (pictured above), Cadbury’s wife of exactly one year, was gravely ill. I knew that Cadbury had two wives, but his second wife, Catharine, is the one who is featured heavily in this collection. What happened to Sara? What was their marriage like? I had lots of questions that demanded answers.

The first letter in Box 6 of this collection holds the key: written from Cadbury to Sara while he is in China and she is in Berkeley, CA, this love letter is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Though he is thousands of miles away, Cadbury writes with such affection for Sara that I had to briefly pause the song playing on my iPod; somehow, 90s *NSYNC ballads pale in comparison to the words of William Warder Cadbury. In the letter, Cadbury speaks of their upcoming wedding and marriage, and gushes about his “dear Sara,” only later to call her, rather solemnly, “my precious Sara” when he writes of her worsening condition to his parents.

Now I had to figure out what happened to Sara one year after their marriage that caused Cadbury such grief. Reading frantically through a few more letters from Cadbury to his parents, I found out that Sara, then three months pregnant with their first child, unexpectedly became so sick with what Cadbury later called “the Toxemia of Pregnancy” that eventually the child had to be removed in an attempt to save the mother’s life. Sara died a few days after the removal of the child. Cadbury speculated after the fact that had they done the procedure a month earlier, her live might have been spared, but she wanted a child so badly that they waited for any sign of recovery, which, sadly, never came.

The tragedy of such a loss affected Cadbury quite a bit, which is evident not only in the way in which he speaks about her final moments, but also in the way he manipulates pen on paper; throughout the emotional letter, written over the course of many days, his handwriting becomes looser and more dramatic. When Sara’s still alive, his writing is neat, as if he’s conserving all his energy for her, but when she passes, he seems to let go of everything and write truly from the heart. Click on the thumbnails below for larger images of the letter.