After William Warder Cadbury’s marriage to Catharine Balderston Jones, they had three children: Jane, Emma, and Catharine. Jane ends up at Wellesley, Emma at Bryn Mawr, and, at this point in my reading, Catharine is presumably still in Canton with her parents as she is not yet college-aged. I’ve been reading Jane’s letters to Emma (or, Erm, affectionately) while they’re at school. The sisters address the envelopes rather charmingly with the recipient’s name, dorm building, and city/state, instead of today’s standard of street number, street, city, state, and zip code. Because of this, I found out that Emma lived in Denbigh, which some of you might be familiar with, and Jane lived in Norumbega Cottage on Wellesley’s campus. They talk about classes, boys, family, China and other world news, and social activities on campus.

In a letter dated November 14, 1937, Jane describes “Freshman hazing day” at Wellesley. (By comparison, Bryn Mawr has Hell Week. WEEK.) She describes the punishment for not knowing the freshman songs: one girl had to “push a half onion down the [aisle] with her nose” while another was made to “scrub the floor with a tooth brush.” Sounds pretty tame compared to the stores I’ve heard from my fellow Mawrtyrs (Mawrters?).

Jane goes on to talk about hockey games and choir try-outs, and then she mentions going to a tea given by the Cosmopolitan Club for MIT foreign students. Wellesley’s Cosmopolitan Club of 1937 is probably most analogous with modern-day Haverford’s International Students Association. (side note: Just as I was looking up the ISA’s link on the Haverford website, I noticed this news–how pertinent to this post, and how exciting for Professor Tensuan!) Jane says that since she came from China, she’s automatically a member of the club.

Reading Jane’s letters is a lot of fun–it’s easy to see similarities between her and some of my own friends. She is definitely a typical college woman, but with an extraordinary family history.

Any questions about the William Warder Cadbury collection can be emailed to me (deannaelizabethbailey@gmail.com) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

The problem I sometimes have with writing blog posts is that no matter the content of the post, I find it nearly impossible to resist inserting a joke or two. Sometimes it’ll be blatantly obvious, but other times it’ll be a hyperlink nestled within the text of a post of a serious nature that takes the reader to a site of a not-so-serious nature. Whatever the guise of my puckish ways, sometimes enough is enough. I came to this conclusion while trying to figure out the subject of this week’s blog post…take a look at some of my original titles:

Why the word “miscellaneous” makes me want to cry

Big Money Trouble in Cadbury’s China

Row, row, row your boat, gently off to war

What can I say? Groan-worthy blog post titles are my forte. But, I promise, today there will be no jokes. Special Collections is serious business. I have, instead, prepared a brief analysis of a trio of manuscripts from Box #44 of the collection: the vaguely titled, wondrous “Letters Not To or From William Warder Cadbury or Catharine Jones Cadbury.” Organized alphabetically by sender’s name, the letters in this box are the bits and pieces left over from the Cadburys’ correspondence, but not insignificant enough to warrant being unincluded in the collection.

Letter no. 1: from Friends of Lingnan. To small list. [1930s]

Rarely is it an easy task to tactfully ask for money, as many college students and their parents know, but once honed, it is a skill to marvel at. One example of this became very clear to me as I was reading through the “F” folder of this box. One particular series of letters stood out to me; sent by William Wistar Comfort, president of Haverford College acting as treasurer of Friends of Lingnan University, they are an appeal to the board to send money to Dr. Cadbury. The nine different letters, spanning 15 years from 1930-1945, at first looked like the same message being sent year after year, but after a careful re-reading, I realized that they tell an amazing story that reflects the political and economic situation of the time period. The first letter reveals the ease with which Comfort deals with the problem of asking for donations. There is no mention of money save for the final sentence: “Perhaps at some future time you might consider it [Lingnan University] as an object of your benevolence.” In 1934, Comfort attempts to extract some more money from the board for a new roof for Cadbury’s residence, which was destroyed by white ants. He also casually mentions at the end of the letter that Dr. Cadbury and his family have given up “their usual year’s furlough” which is now a year past-due, and might not be able to come to America for another two years.

The letters continue, becoming more direct in their message. 1935: “We still have an extra amount to collect, about $700.” 1936: “Please send check now.” Another 1936 letter: “If you have not given in the past, begin now. If you gave last year add 50% to your gift.” By 1939, Dr. Cadbury had to move his work to Hong Kong because the Japanese occupation made it too dangerous to continue working and teaching in Canton. Comfort doesn’t let the board forget this–he continues appealing to the board on behalf of Cadbury and his family, and again calls out non-participants, sending a specialized letter specifically to those who, according to his records, have not yet pledged money. Reading each of these letters one after another is almost exhausting, though Comfort remains steadfast, and his contribution proves vital to the success of Cadbury’s mission.

Letter no. 2:  from Edward. To Family. Somewhere in the Atlantic, 1918 8/2-1918 8/19

This August 1918 letter from “Edward” to “Family” poignantly describes a young man’s maritime journey across the Atlantic on his way to the south of France for military duty. Among his poetic descriptions of the water, Edward muses hopefully about returning home and reflects on the books he reads while on the ship (one being John Marvel, Assistant by Thomas Nelson Page, available on Google Books!). I got the sense that this was not your typical soldier. Edward seems very introspective, a quality I’ve often found common among Haverford students. He seems to carefully choose his words so as not to worry his family; he calls his time spent in the military “traveling around the world” and says that he thinks it is a good way to learn languages, “if you follow the life long enough.” I wondered how long Edward followed this life. What he didn’t know in August was that the war was to end in November. I wondered if he lived to see the end of the war and was able to return home. It is difficult to find an answer to these questions because my only clues are his first name and the date–other details, such as the ship’s name and his last name, are either self-censored to protect a military mission or left out because of the assumed familiarity between sender and recipient.

Letter no. 3: from Jane. To Edward. [1925-1930]

This letter from young Jane Cadbury, daughter of William and Catharine, is a love note addressed to another mysterious Edward. It’s unlikely that this Edward and the one from Letter no. 2 are the same, since at the time Jane’s note was sent, the previous Edward would be about 30 years old. (I know, I know, I really wanted it to be the same Edward, too.) Nevertheless, her note conceals a hidden message: “To my love” scrawled in the unmistakable handwriting of a child just learning to write. On a piece of paper accompanying the red cut-out heart is the more mature script of Catharine Cadbury, telling Edward that Jane’s note was made several days earlier. Catharine seeks to ensure that the letter’s lateness must not be misattributed to any reluctance on Jane’s behalf.

All in all, these letters, though sometimes mysterious, give us a richer view of William and Catharine Cadbury’s life. This collection continues to reveal treasures that luckily have been well-preserved, and creating a finding aid for the collection continues to be a wonderful summer adventure.

Any questions about the William Warder Cadbury collection can be emailed to me (deannaelizabethbailey@gmail.com) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

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.

Hello, library fans!

Now that you’ve heard from Patrick a couple of times about our work with the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine Jones Cadbury papers, I thought I’d give you an idea of what goes on from my side of the desk.  While Patrick’s expertise is East Asian history, mine deals with the more technical aspect of processing a collection and creating a finding aid.  I’m pretty sure our pairing for the summer was somewhat orchestrated by the powers that be (i.e. the wonderful staff of Special Collections), whose mysterious ways I have always admired.

The last students to work on this project left us with a Microsoft Word document version of an almost-completed finding aid for the WWC collection.  At that point, we were not yet using Archivists’ Toolkit, which is an open-source archival data management program used to create finding aids. It has also been my best friend for the past year, since I’ve been using it to create (from scratch!) a finding aid for the Haverford College History Collection, a daunting yet wildly fascinating task.

In fact, much of what goes on in Special Collections on any given day can be described as “daunting yet wildly fascinating,” but usually it’s more of the latter and less of the former. This holds true for the WWC collection, which, at first glance, looks like an amassing of letters, photographs, and pamphlets.  But as you get to know the collection, you realize that, yes, it is many decades’ worth of papers, but it tells a story rife with history, and breathes life back into what most of us only read about in textbooks.

As you might have noticed from Patrick’s blog posts, some of the seemingly most pedestrian details can be of significant importance to a researcher.  It is our job to make those details available for potential researchers, giving the pedestrian a chance to become paramount. Less poetically, our job is to use Archivists’ Toolkit to create a finding aid that can be posted online, and easily found by a Google search. This required first that we be trained in AT through a boot camp led by Holly Mengel and Courtney Smertz, who are currently part of the team that is working on the PACSCL’s “Hidden Collections” project. Having worked with AT before, I felt at ease with most of what Holly taught us, but she was still able to teach me a few tricks that make inputting data considerably easier and faster (rapid data entry, anyone?).

We hope to finish processing the last few boxes and be able to complete a finding aid for this collection by the end of the summer. We will continue blogging about our progress along the way, so stay tuned!

Questions or comments about the project can be emailed to me (dbailey@haverford.edu) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

-Deanna

I began working in Special Collections in the summer of 2008 after my freshman year at Haverford.  I worked with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson on two projects.  The first was a light conservation of the Hartshorne family papers.  The Hartshorne family is a prominent Quaker family in the Philadelphia area.  I also looked through the archives of the Haverford and Bi-Co News to look for connections between Haverford and China for an exhibit on Haverford’s relationship with China.

During the 2008-2009 academic year I worked with Quaker Bibliographer and Special Collections Librarian Ann Upton on a number of projects.  The first was an inventory of the William Jenks collection, a collection of early Quaker writings from around the time of the founding of the Society of Friends.  The second project was a re-housing and inventory of the Quaker Broadside collection.  This project has led to the on-going digitization of the collection.  Upon completion of the inventory, I displayed some of the work I had done on the collection and gave a presentation to the Haverford Corporation/Board of Managers describing the project.  I also regularly worked with Ann checking in Serials and keeping our Serials group collection up to date.

During the summer of 2009, I again worked with Diana Peterson to create a finding aid for the William Warder Cadbury and Catherine Jones Cadbury collection.  For most of the summer I dealt with the numerous unsorted photos in the collection.  Many of these photos were from their stay as Quaker missionaries in Canton, China at the Canton Christian College.  I sorted them into folders, performed some light conservation on them, and ultimately created a finding aid so they can be easily available to scholars.

This fall, I have continued working with Ann Upton on the Serial groups and now the Pamphlet groups collections.  In addition, I have been working on an inventory of the Quaker Rare Books Collection, a collection substantially larger than the Jenks Collection I worked with last year.

Outside of my work in Special Collections, I am a Philosophy major at Haverford and a Political Science minor at Bryn Mawr and am interested mostly in political philosophy.  I also run on the cross country and track teams here at Haverford.

Primary materials relating to Japan are a strength among our collections, but these materials are mainly textual.  We have, relatively, much less pertaining to China, though in recent years, we have seen a notable increase in these holdings. In the last week, we’ve received a small group of photographs taken or purchased in Japan and China in the early 20th century by Lloyd Balderston, an American Quaker teacher of  physics and chemistry, whose daughter, Esther, became a missionary in Japan.  The  photograph posted here depicts an aspect in the manufacture of white leather at Matsubaramura on the island of Honshu, ca. 1919.  There is at least one other image of what Balderston called a "primitive industry" among the collection donated by Charles Lord.  Lord has offered to donate more such images and we have been enthusiastic in accepting his offer.