Separation List
Today I learned a new phrase: Separation List.
Included in the Burnap/Hyde Collection are a number of published volumes; mostly almanacs, some primers. For whatever reason, this topic never came up in my archives classes, and I never gave much thought to what you'd do with non-unique materials in an archival collection. Today I learned - step 1: you try to figure out what they are. Photos and printed material get taken out and sent to different departments at CHS, graphics and the library. Those departments decide what they accession and what they discard. Step 2: you try to figure out the correct way to cite the separated printed material in a separation list to include in the finding aid.
Step 1: Many of the alamancs had torn or missing covers, so figuring out what exactly they were was not as simple as might seem.
Step 2: Serials cataloging is confusing in the best of circumstances, but 19th Century pamphlets and alamacs often changed publishers, locations, and even titles from year to year. When I tried consulting WorldCat to find the "correct" citation I realized that there was no consensus. Each publication had 4 or 5 entries catalged different ways.
For example, the American Tract Society published a yearly almanac called, at times, The Christian Almanac for Connecticut, The Christian Almanac for Connecticut and Massachusetts, The Christian Almanac for the State of Connecticut, and The Christian Almanac for New-York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. They were published in Hartford, New York, and New Haven. But they were also the "same" publication in that they contained the same information and were sponsored by the same company.
This is how I decided to do it…
Burnap, Hyde & Post Family Papers MS 101941
Separation List
Photographs and objects have been transferred to the graphics and museum departments.
The following items were removed from the collection and do not appear in the finding aid:
Serials & Almanacs:
The Connecticut Register/The Connecticut Register and United States Calendar/Green's Almanack and Register for the State of Connecticut published by Samuel Green, New London, CT for the years 1804,1805,1810,1814,1816
Beer's Almanac 1813. published by Andrew Beers, Hartford, CT.
Marsh's Almanac 1819. published by William S. Marsh, Hartford, CT.
The Christian Almanack for New-York, Connecticut, and New-Jersey 1827. Published by the American Tract Society, New York, NY.
The Christian Almanac for Connecticut 1830. vol. II, no. 3. Published by the American Tract Society, Connecticut Branch.
The Christian Almanac for New-York, Connecticut, and New-Jersey 1835. Published by the American Tract Society, New York, NY.
The Illustrated Family Christian Almanac. 1856. Published by the American Tract Society, New York, NY.
The New England Primer published by Ira Webster, Hartford, CT after 1850.
The Connecticut Register: Being a State Calendar of Public Officers and Institutions for 1870. Published by Brown & Gross, Hartford, CT. 1870
Tee-Totaler's Minstrel (possibly the Washingtonian Tee-Totalers' Minstrel) published by John Slater, New York, New York. no date, missing cover.
Time Management
This whole “not knowing what’s important until you know it’s not important” thing has really skewed any time management skills I ever had (not saying much.) I was attracted to library work in the first place (and I suspect I’m not the only one) because I crave order out of chaos. I like hunting down information and sorting and labeling the previously unknown. This instinct in me means I am easily engrossed in individual stories, I want to chase down leads and I don’t want to stop until everyone has a unique identifier and a place in the grand schema. Perfect example - the Lincoln papers. See that previous entry for a description.
The problem is that, in archives, this instinct is anathema to what we’re trying to do. I am just supposed to be processing. No one told me to hunt down everything I could find on the Connecticut Kansas Colony – that’s way outside our purview. I’m just supposed to be summarizing what’s here so that researchers can find it. I don’t know why I’m finding this so hard! In some ways I think the weight of the collection is bearing on me. I want to do it right – I want to impress the CHS, I don’t want to let Barbara down. Similarly, the little real-world archives training we’ve had in school has focused on hidden collections and how it’s our job to expose these incredible finds to the light of the world. This collection is so old and so vast that I am terrified I’ll overlook something. There’s documents from 1740, documents signed by Bushnells and other fancy Connecticut names that sound vaguely familiar. One night of googling has told me that Daniel Burnap is an important guy – this collection was important enough for the CHS to obtain it. What if this collection contains groundbreaking information that I overlook?
This is all probably the kind of thing that goes away with time and experience. I remember the first time a mom came into the library to ask for a read-aloud recommendation to read to her child’s class; I totally freaked out. In my mind, this one book recommendation was going to be the difference between a good memory and trauma. I had to get the perfect book or else I was horrible at my job. This feeling went away after about a month. I would assume there’s a similar curve for archives work, though I’ve never heard it mentioned. In the meantime I have to keep reminding myself to stay on-task and try to finish some big picture, concrete things. Every day that I walk out of here without a tangible example of “this is what I did today” it just feels horrible. To the outside observer it probably looks like I’ve accomplished precisely nothing.
Mourning
Today was an incredibly sad day. I don't know how good I'd be at this job on a professional level. I keep getting carried away emotionally by the stories in these boxes. I'm laughing out loud and what I read, I'm groaning and rolling my eyes sometimes, and today I am saddened and haunted. Two figures loom large in the Burnap's box and today I happened to be dealing with both of them. Their letters, notebooks and assorted ephemera make up the largest segment of this collection by bulk, and If all you had to go on were the contents of this box, you would think that Daniel K. Burnap and Emily Hollister Hyde were the two most important and most influential members of this family.
Daniel K. Burnap was the only son of Daniel (the clockmaker) Burnap. He died in his sophomore year at Yale, Emily Hollister Hyde was the middle daughter of Charlotte Elizabeth Burnap and T.C.P. Hyde. She also died in college (one later source said she was thrown from a carriage). These two unexpected and quick deaths clearly traumatized their families, and souvenirs from these short life are throughout this collection. Firstly there are the letters; at least 100 letters and postcards from Emily's last 2 years survive. Her family were all prolific letter writers, but Charlotte Elizabeth did not save nearly as many letters from her other two children. Emily's death- shocking, and violent- must have been the reason these letters were saved. Emily wrote home at least once, usually twice, a week during her two years away at school. I had to put them in chronological order today and I couldn't help but find it upsetting when the regular letters stop so abruptly that December. After she passed, someone in her family collected all her letters from this time to her immediate family and even to close friends. Combined Emily's letters from a single 20-month period make up the largest single chunk of materials in the whole collection. In addition to her mundane letters, there are random bits and pieces that could only hold sentimental value to her family. For example, triangles and squares about 3" wide were wrapped in brown paper labelled "patchwork worked by Emily."
Similarly, the memory of Daniel K. loomed large. His childhood school workbooks survived 150 years despite damage by bugs fire and dry rot. The writing in them is barely visible anymore, Sad poems and odes are also included.
Beecher Bible & Rifle Church
Today I spent more time reading and transcribing T.C.P. Hyde's letters from Kansas. In addition to the 4 letters, there are handwritten transcriptions presumably made by E. K. Post in the 1920s. Unfortunately, the handwriting on these is just as hard to read as the original.
THE CONNECTICUT KANSAS COLONY OF WABAUNSEE, KANSAS
The company began with a meeting in the New Haven Temperance Hall on February 18, 1856. "Agreement of the Kansas Company: We, the undersigned, do hereby agree to unite in a Company for immigrating to Kansas in the month of March next, & to be governed by, & act upon the following principles. The Company Shall consist of from twenty five to one hundred & fifty men… The business of the Company Shall be So managed as to give equal facilities & advantages, as far as possible, to all to all according to their circumstances. A Majority vote Shall decide all questions in regard to the Companys affairs." (http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/90161 ) That same day a notice was printed in the local New Haven paper, "Notice is hereby given that a company is being formed for the purpose of emigrating to Kansas. Those, therefore, who desire to aid in establishing the Institutions of New England, and to secure for themselves and their families a good home in that delightful country, are requested to communicate with the subscriber as early as practicable. Men of all professions, and especially farmers are needed, but only such as will be able to contribute in some substantial manner to the building up of a flourishing community." (https://www.kshs.org/p/letters-of-charles-b-lines-the-connecticut-kansas-colony/13115)
Neither statement said outright what the newspaper notice only hinted at, specifically “the Institutions of New England,” e.g. the prohibition of slavery. The Kansas Company was an abolitionist attempt to settle in Kansas after the Kansas-Nebraska act called for the territorial inhabitants to decide for themselves the "slavery question." While there were many such companies of interested settlers, the Kansas Company became most well-known because of a gift from Henry Ward Beecher and his Plymouth Church congregation - 25 bibles and 25 Sharps rifles. This signaled a new reality in Bleeding Kansas but aroused much comment in the press at the time, and the colony founded by the Kansas Company was thereafter frequently called the "Beecher Bible & Rifle Colony" and the particular model Sharps rifle was nicknamed a "Beecher Bible." The Kansas Company's colony (also called the Connecticut Colony, the New Haven Colony, or the Beecher Rifle Colony) remains the most well-known among these groups of New England agitators who moved west.
Thomas Cotton Parmalee Hyde was an active member in the Connecticut-Kansas Company from the first meeting back in New Haven. He personally was the 13th man (of 90) to sign the declaration of incorporation and either vouched for or induced 2 others to sign as well (their names are ascribed "per Hyde" or "from Hyde.") He also served as secretary of the Company. T.C.P. Hyde travelled back and forth to Kansas several times and spent at least one year trying to make a go of farm life. The Hyde family papers in my collection are predominantly belonging to his children, but the Hyde siblings knew enough to save four of their father's extant letters from his time in Kansas.
These letters are notable for several reasons. First and foremost, he's a direct eyewitness to history. Bleeding Kansas is a subject that people care about. The University of Kansas And the Kansas State Historical Society collect material from this period. People write theses and books about these colonies. Wabaunsee, KS is on the National Register of Historic Places. But the letters are also important because they give a contrary account to the popular narrative. Charles B. Lines, who founded the Company, seemed to control the ‘messaging’ as well. His reports home dominated newspaper coverage, his personal papers and diaries are used by researchers and his version of the story is generally accepted. But it seems that T.C.P. Hyde had some real problems - both with Mr. Lines and his fellow settlers. Hyde's letters detail difficult winters, internal fighting (someone stealing his tree seeds, someone else stealing his coat…) He is able to add a human dimension to the high-minded story. The settlers founded the town of Wabaunsee and they set out to erect town buildings while also claiming as much land as possible and raising sufficient crops. But it turns out that building a house is hard. Farming is hard. Getting along with your neighbors is hard - especially when they are Pottawatomie Indians or Yale students and New England townsfolk suddenly trying to live a pioneer lifestyle. These two themes dominate the 4 letters of T.C.P. Hyde.
The first letter is dated May 6, 1856 and addressed to “My own beloved Charlotte” (i.e. Charlotte Elizabeth Burnap). This letter refers to a meeting between Mr. Lines and a “Captain K” that both men denied and some further misunderstanding between Lines and Hyde that T.C.P. Hyde is hesitant to detail in writing, other than to say that Lines “has attempted to make a speculation out of his dealings with me – by false accounts” but Hyde is magnanimous at this point, writing that “I do not regard Mr. L with unmixed animosity” and writing cautioning about judging “too harshly of our fellow servants.” The letter goes on to more private topics – it seems that Hyde and Charlotte Elizabeth Burnap were married and possibly in secret before he left for Kansas and he warns her not to publish their marriage in the papers. “We were under peculiar circumstances and must not count it much that we are judged peculiarly by those who had no appreciation of our trials.” Charlotte is apparently dealing with blowback from this elopement from people who “suspects that you were violently carried away from house and married in delaine and calico.”
The next two letters are dated a year later, both on May 1, 1857. The first describes the funeral morning of the local Potawatomi chief, as well as the problems with the still unbuilt church building. Some of the church members are away at the constitutional convention in Topeka. The second letter from that day talks about some of the other Connecticut families in the group. Hyde was away from Kansas at the last harvest and his crop seems to have been lost. He’s only recently arrived back at the colony and he found things “enough to try my faith and patience very much.” In Hyde’s absence, Lines had spread word that he (Lines ) had bought Hyde out and that Hyde wouldn’t be returning. Some fellow colonists then helped themselves to whatever belongings Hyde had left behind. When Hyde did arrive after all, his trunk was broken and other settlers were wearing his clothes. His tools have been stolen and his wagon damaged. His corn crop was destroyed, too, as were all his seeds.
The final letter is undated. At this point a new sawmill is expected and Hyde is scrounging for money and listing who owes him for what and how much. The sawmill is run by agents of Mr. Lines and Hyde apparently thinks they could be doing a better job. His melon seeds have been stolen as well. Hyde goes on to explain that the preemption law the settlers had planned on using to gain lawful ownership of their land will not work for the Colony because they chose to settle in a village and sell lots. So he lists a number of different methods they plan to obtain title. Hyde describes some anecdotes about claim jumpers, too.
"Non-Traditional Materials"
On my second or third time here I stuck my hand into an envelope of human hair. I yelped, then was instantly embarrassed. Such a rookie mistake! Well, today it happened again. And I yelped, again.
These two collections alone have included a wide assortment of "non-traditional" materials, at least things that don't have a MARC 007 code for 'physical description', things I don't even know how to describe in a folder list, and things I am not sure if I should remove or leave be.
Some examples - pressed flowers: The general rule seems to be to remove anything that seems organic and might attract bugs. But what if they're artificial?
Needlework
Knitting instructions
Recipes
Quilt Square templates, a.k.a. cardboard triangles
Human Hair
Children's Schoolbooks/essays
Commonplace Books (a word I learned today)
Newspaper Clippings (unidentified): CHS policy is to photocopy newsprint onto acid-free paper and discard the original. The majority of the clippings I have found leave no clues as to the date or source, though. How do I report this?
GRANT/WHEELER OR HATFIELD/MCCOY?
I keep meaning to write an entry about why I'm bad at this job and handwriting would have to be top of that list. I can. Not. read. It. Barbara seems to decipher the scrawl-iest, faded writing so easily that I'm starting to think it's something with me. But today's rabbit hole would have been SO much less time-intensive if I could tell what these papers said!
Anyway - Today was another attempt to clear out the "I have no clue" folder, this time uncovering the melodramatic saga of the Grants and the Wheelers.
Why did this take me so long?
- Names - lots of names, clearly written (unlike the facts of the case)… none belonging to our canonical families. Because these papers involved a court case and included legal documents I assumed that at some point! I'd stumble across a Burnap or Hyde serving as witness or justice. That just never happened.
- Drama - the papers involved a property dispute that took place in 1835 and was not finally resolved until 1908. In addition, documents are included in evidence from as far back as 1772. From a distance, it looks like two neighbors bickering over petty things for ¾ of a century. This is the kind of soap opera drama I can really sink my teeth into.
- Pictures! - there are at least 3, maybe 4 maps and surveys in this collection, which was a wonderful variation from the monotony of last week's Emily letters.
- Handwriting (aforementioned). Because this sounds like a juicy story I was genuinely interested to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, affidavits and shorthand recordings of testimony are so hard to read and are by nature one-sided. I was not getting the full story from any one sample of these papers. In fact I still don't really understand what the fight was about. I realized it was taking me 5-10 minutes to make sense of a single page, and I started to feel ridiculous sitting there, clearly not "working".
Here's what I know:
The Grant family originally owned the entire farmland in question as far back as 1772. At some point the Wheeler family bought an adjacent farm. At some other point a turnpike road was installed crossing both families land. This is where it gets hazy. There was a fence- someone knocked down the fence or was supposed to fix it and didn't, or maybe the built a fence so that the other family could not access the road? There were questions of access - who owned what and who could and could not be on what road. It seems that the Wheelers might have taken advantage of the turnpike's construction to block of land rightfully owned by the Grant family. At least, that was the final, sad coda in 1908. Included in this stack of papers is a probate report after the death without heirs of Edwin H. Grant in 1890. It took the Norwich Probate court 18 years to figure out what to do with the land.
What could I do differently?
Again, Turn off my brain. I have to stop getting personally invested in some of these stories. In this case, my own family has a very similar Jarndyce & Jarndyce-type court case through my grandfather's property in northern Wisconsin. He owned three lots, built a long driveway (small road) through the woods to his house then sold all but the middle lot, so technically the driveway bisects the neighbor's land, but my grandfather had an easement to use that road. Well, 30 years later we're still fighting with the neighbors over 3 feet of swampland. It's the principle of the thing! So naturally I was delighted to see my own families petty behavior reflected in papers from 195 years ago. But obviously, if I were to be doing this professionally and on a schedule I can't go emotionally connecting with every little thing like I have been this fall. It's emotionally draining if nothing else!
DO THINGS NEATLY
Standing note to myself
I have been struggling with notetaking. While I’m immersed in the work and up to my elbows in papers I feel like I know this family so well that there’s no way I’ll forget the different storylines I’m uncovering. But after a week of real life it is so hard to remember what I was doing a week prior. I’ve tried taking pictures and writing notes… but the process of making sense of this stuff is so overwhelming that it’s impossible to remember what’s important to know. So end of day notes are an ongoing problem, but unless I want to spend the last hour of my time each day writing myself a summary of everything I did, everything I learned, and everything I wanted to look up but got distracted… well that would take the whole day.
Along these same lines I’ve been struggling with my notetaking skills in general. At this point I have about 10 pages of notebook filled up with “notes” that are just random names, dates, or indecipherable symbols. I learned how to do research two ways – with notecards where you copy every fact and quote or using Zotero to save every citation for each source you consult. I don’t have all the time in the world (notecards) or internet access (Zotero) and even if I did, these are primary sources. My instinct is to document every little thing and cite where it came from, but common sense and MPLP are screaming in my brain that I can’t process at the item level. I have made some adaptations. I have made a concerted effort to take notes in full sentences. Instead of writing “Burnap Post 3 Aug 1911” and then having zero recollection of what that means and where I got it, I’m trying to write complete thoughts. e.g.” Burnap Post was Mary Elizabeth’s second cousin. “I also put a reminder on my project binder to do things neatly and legibly the first time around. Barbara has such neat handwriting and it seems so effortless that more than once this month I’ve loaded my Amazon cart with various penmanship workbooks. Why don’t they teach us library hand in school anymore? Meanwhile I keep writing things down thinking “I’ll copy this neatly later,” but by the time I go to transcribe I have no idea what it’s all about.
Similarly my finding aid has been written and rewritten a million times. I keep telling myself it’s just a draft and I’ll write the real thing later. It dawned on me that this is just adding an extra layer of work to the project. Why do I do this?
These families are more confusing than a modern family. They ALL have the same names, and it’s not just the common names. Forget knowing the difference between Daniel K. Daniel M. and the mysterious other Daniel Burnap who drowned in a river at age 13, I can’t event be sure that Bissell E. and Bissell K. are different people. To make things worse, I’ve been consulting different histories and retrospectives of prominent citizens of the area like The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut and the Commemorative biographical record of Tolland and Windham counties, Connecticut. But these books are from 1893 and 1903 respectively, and have a great deal of contradictory information.
I’m afraid I will never make sense of this collection unless I want to take the time to become an EXPERT in these families – chasing down vital records, etc. – which I know is exactly what you’re NOT supposed to do as an archivist processing collections. Based on the literature we read in class I thought it would be easy enough flip through the papers and get a general idea of what was there and regarding whom. My only other hands-on experience was sorting cemetery records at Green-Wood and that was dealing with one person at one specific time in their lives. This is at least 50 people over 200 years. It’s soul-crushing, in a way. I’ve been asked to do something I should know how to do if I want to pursue my chosen profession, and yet I feel constantly underwater. WHAT IS ALL THIS STUFF!!!
WHAT DO THESE NOTE MEAN?
No clue.
For real, no clue.
The Ballad of Albert Lincoln
Today was another wild goose chase. I spent the day in a meeting, figuring out who the Lincolns were and trying to remember what I did last week. This entire Burnap collection, which was housed mostly horizontally in one file box, was not in any kind of order beyond various clumps. Most families were stacked together and, like an archaeologist sifting through one layer at a time, I could kind of figure out who went where based on what it was clumped with. Not so the Lincolns.
One of the manuscripts in the best surviving condition is a typewritten packet titled "In Memory of Albert Lincoln: compiled and edited by Marvin Lincoln 1899." This document, about 30 pages in length, stands out for its professionalism. It's typewritten, bound, has footnotes, sources, etc. Its topic is oozing in heavy sentimentality - Western Expansion, early American military, and, a brother's mission to right the wrongs of an indifferent society… The dummy untrained archivist would look at it and think, "This must be important! I need to figure this out!" and so of course I did, too. After about 3 hours, I can't tell you much else.
This document was written/compiled (and presumably printed) by Marvin Lincoln in 1899. The introductory title page spells out his situation clearly - Marvin had a brother Albert, who he was too young to know well. Albert (born 1802) enlisted as a West Point cadet in 1818. In 1822 his unit shipped west, and Albert died at Fort Bellefontaine in St. Louis that same year. Apparently there was an outbreak of some kind and Albert died after a very brief illness before anyone back home knew what had happened. His burial site remained unmarked, though, and Marvin Lincoln's motivation in 1899 was to locate and commemorate his brother's final resting place.
So more than 70 years later, Marvin Lincoln set about contacting US Army officials and military acquaintances of his brothers, in an effort to locate his brother's body and commemorate his short time on earth. All of this is fine, decent, touching and heartbreaking stuff. He reprints letters and newspaper reports from St. Louis as well as full reports by his brother's commanding officers. Despite Marvin’s efforts, though, he was unable to locate his brother's remains or burial site more specifically than the former Fort Bellefontaine site.
Fort Bellefontaine (or Belle Fontaine - Marvin writes it as 1 word but 2015 historians use 2) was established in 1805, the first US Military post west of the Mississippi River. Lewis and Clark began and ended their expedition at Bellefontaine, and it served as an important base for many US government expeditions of the era. But in 1826 the army moved operations to the Jefferson Barracks Military Post and the site of the old Fort eventually became a national park. By the time Marvin Lincoln was asking in the late 1890s, no one knew for sure if Albert was interred somewhere on the old fort grounds or in the new barracks site - all that was clear was that he had been buried but that his name was not listed on any of the marked internment sites of the Jefferson Barracks Cemetery.
This sad fate clearly seemed to weigh on Marvin - he painstakingly tried to recreate his brother's last days. He reprints an urgent letter a concerned acquaintance sent his father after seeing Albert's name on a list of dead or dying published locally in St. Louis papers. His family did not seem to learn about Albert's fate until months later.
The amateur psychologist in me thinks that Marvin Lincoln was so disturbed by his brother's short life and lonely death that he was driven to create this document as a testament to his brother's life. "Look," it seems to scream - "this person mattered." His family (especially their father) clearly had a lot of pride and hope for Albert's future, so to have him cut down more or less immediately at his first post from curable illness must have left deep psychological scars.
So… yet another highly dramatic story, and the added pathos of it sitting unread and unremarked on for 116 years only made it weigh on my mind more and more. I definitely got caught up in the drama of this story. After rummaging through all these indecipherable fragmentary stories I could not hold back from indulging in a readable, concise saga. But the Lincoln Bros. hold two problems for me. Who are they? And why would anyone care now?
The second question is easier to answer - probably no one, maybe military historians? I felt compelled to try to attach a "hook" to the Lincoln papers because they're such a compelling read. Maybe I can "sell" this document to researchers? In addition to his sad death, Marvin covers in intimate detail what life was like for his brother as a West Point cadet in 1818-1822. Seriously - intimate detail. He reprints letters to and from Albert from their father covering student hijinks and scandals, as well as his daily life and class schedule. Marvin includes a wonderfully detailed biographical sketch of every prominent west point instructors and fellow cadets from Connecticut. These sources might be interesting to a person researching specific people or military culture in general. But these are incidental uses - I don't know that anyone, besides me, is going to read this document in the next 116 years specifically to learn about the short life of Albert Lincoln.
The harder question that led me down this rabbit hole in the first place is"Who ARE these people??" I know that I'm supposed to be focusing on the Burnaps. The collection itself is overwhelmingly Hyde papers, though. I know that most of these names - Hyde, Post, Kellogg, Kingsbury, etc. are all cousins in some sense, and all are Hebron/Bolton/Andover big shots. Never once have I seen the name Lincoln. If this packet had been about a Skinner cousin or something I would never have opened it up and spent so long on one thing. I'd have tossed it in the Skinner pile and moved on. Two weeks ago I would have put this in the "I dunno" pile and moved on - but now it's kind of imperative that I put it somewhere. I refuse to do too much more detective work on this. The best I can find is that Marvin Lincoln moved around a lot - his census returns are filed from a different state each decade, including time spent in Washington, DC. He's buried in the Windham, Connecticut Old Cemetery with 3 Posts, 5 Hydes, and 4 Kingsburys. My best guess is that Marvin Lincoln printed many copies of his memorial to his brother and passed them out to influential people he knew either from Windham or from his travels. Because the document looks impressive and because of its weighty subject, our collecting family saved it because it seemed important. It does not have direct bearing on our main story at all.
So was this a day wasted? Did I learn a lesson here? How could I have done this any better or more efficiently? There was no need for me to read the whole document, really. I was skimming through trying to find some reference to any of our main "protagonists" (e.g. "Today I met my new bunk mate - Daniel XYZ Burnap.") But I definitely got a little more into it than was necessary. I also didn't really have to research up Fort Bellefontaine. - Or did I? I had no idea where or what that was. What if this was a firsthand account of some famous plague outbreak? What if, what if, what if???
I am finding that this work is slow-going, with lots of dead ends.
The World's Worst Handwriting
Two interesting things today:
1) I found a document referencing my hometown of Southbury, CT and
2) I found an example of what could be the world's worst handwriting.
They appear to be related to each other, but not clearly to anyone in my collection, and I am too overwhelmed to really delve into it.
"I, Joseph Holbrook of Southbury in the County of Litchfield and State of Connecticut for the consideration of fifty pounds lawful money rec'd to my full satisfaction of Simeon Loomis of East Windsor in the county of Hartford & state afores'd" Some land maybe in Preston, CT? 21st Day of June 1791.
This is interesting if only because on the surface it looks like Southbury is a commuter town of strip malls and that sprung to life when the interstate highway was built in the late 1960s. There is no real "downtown" to my town. But there have been farms and villages here since the colonial era and it was just cool to see it referenced in such an old document.
The Southbury letter was located with two letters? Affidavits? Declarations? Written in an angular, incomprehesible text made all the more frustrating because roughly ever 10th word was clear. This is how I know both documents deal with someone/something in Preston, CT. But the rest of might as well be written in ancient runes. Good thing I'm starting to panic about making progress - it kept me from spending too long trying to read this or getting caught up. It might be something, but my families names weren't readily clear so it's going in the folder marked "Miscellaneous" (that I have to change because I know that is one of B.'s pet peeves)
On Management
Lately, as I've been finishing my time in graduate school, I've been thinking about the things I was taught (or not taught) that have come up in my day-to-day work.
Take MANAGEMENT, for example.
The basics of managing a staff, working with other people, delegating tasks, making schedules etc. were never covered in my library school education. Project management and marketing are two huge components of library work and I feel utterly deficient sometimes, not to mention managing a staff, facilities management. I recently purchased on Ebay a 1936 Pratt SILS course catalog ($8!!!) and was shocked to find the first required class listed: Library Administration. The description listed "such practical questions as schedules, budgets, business methods, library buildings…". I guess everyone in the real-world job pool assumes that undergraduate college teaches these basic business skills? My degree did not. The first time I had to do a long-term project with more than one person I just about died. I have seen firsthand how good (or bad) communication across an office can be.
Today I had firsthand demonstration of the importance of management skills when I sat in on another planning meeting with CHS staff – 20 employees attended (18 of them female). The last meeting I attended was an all-staff meeting that included a variety of topics (e.g. paving) but this was a meeting just for the people involved in education and exhibitions. The meeting was run by the chief curator and I thought she did a fantastic job.
I’ve learned a lot about professionalism and management from attending these meetings.
1. Agendas - know what you're going to be discussing ahead of time and stick to it. The chief curator hooked her laptop to the overhead projector and before starting she displayed an agenda with time limits for each planned topic. I've been in so many meetings when a guideline like this might have kept everyone on track.
2. Good Planning - Most of the meeting involved scrolling through supervisor’s Google calendar until the next group meeting. My first thought was, “wow, she’s busy.” And my second was “wow, she’s planned ahead.” She showed the staff everything that she had scheduled between today and next month when the team meets again. My current job uses a shared Google calendar but there’s no way to know who’s reading and updating it and when. This was a good way for her to show her staff, “this is what’s going on - if it’s not on here I don’t know about it,” and it allows staff to see what is coming up for their supervisor. I also think it's important that she recognizes the importance of sharing this information with subordinates and coworkers. I have worked in a handful of library situations where the person in charge works in a vacuum and no one knows what they're doing. This kind of situation can quickly become counterproductive.
3. Have a Leader In Charge – I have only worked in public libraries and lots of times there was no clear organization chart about who was in charge. Meetings, then, would descend into chaos. The chief curator seems like a perfectly nice person (we’ve never actually had a conversation) and she seems to have a good, respectful report with the rest of the staff. Nonetheless, she was clearly "in charge” during this meeting.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Doing this job is kind of like going on a scavenger hunt when you don't know what to look for. How can I organize papers until I know what the papers contain? I suppose that is the existential crisis at the heart of all archives work, but still - its hard to know. Maybe this is a professional judgement thing that will come with time?
Today I spent a very long time figuring out who Julia Clark was and where she fit into the story. One of the more easily identifiable chunks of material was a Mount Holyoke class catalog from 1889, multiple pieces of correspondence, and newspaper clippings regarding Mrs. Clark's time in college. It seems that when a classmate died she'd cut out their obituary and check their names off in the alumni directory. The correspondence was with classmates asking for reminiscences. It took me the afternoon to put this all together - was this important? No. Not really - from a research standpoint Mrs. Clark's college stuff was not important at all. The newspaper clippings and the alumni directory were both mass printed - that information was "out there" somewhere. The letters were equally inconsequential. This only dawned on me AFTER I had spent time on it, though. "Mrs. Clark" popped up on a lot of materials, and I thought that because her story took up a proportionally large amount of space in this families papers it was worth spending a lot of time on. I hope this is the kind of professional judgement call that an archivist gets better at recognizing. In the meantime I might have wasted a lot of time.
Mrs. Clark collected obituaries of her classmates...
and methodically marked off their names in her class directory.
First Meeting/Bullard Family
Today was my first official day of doing work. The morning was spent in an All-Staff meeting and after lunch I began sorting through a small collection that’s recently come in.
ALL-STAFF MEETING
The All-Staff staff meeting was my first good look at how this place works. There were 24 employees participating. It's my impression that there are lots of independent departments - I'm not sure who is who, and who works together. But beyond witnessing a real-live business meeting (first time ever), I learned some interesting facts.
Stats: It seems that no library anywhere has come up with an efficient and helpful way to keep relevant measures in this kind of environment. This has been an issue at every library I've ever worked in. How do we keep track of how well we are engaging our patrons? How do you measure patron satisfaction? One of the first things the man running the meeting mentioned was how they'd hired a Louisville-based "measurement instruments consultant.” User/Visitor statistics and analytics were mentioned again, later. I’m not sure how you get to be a “measurement instruments consultant,” but it seems like it’d be a good field to be in.
Foresight and Planning: Very impressive. Their strategic plan seems to actually be a functioning plan and not an aspirational document hidden in a drawer somewhere. Digitization is a key initiative and they've identified 4 target areas for potential digitization The French & Indian War collection, the portrait collection, the CT Soldiers' Orphans' Home collection and the Chinese Aid Mission collection. A large amount of the meeting was taken up discussing funding and revenue streams, membership numbers and corporate sponsors. Facilities management was another topic I hadn't considered. Because the museum is in a historic home there are a lot of maintenance issues I'd never really thought about - how DO you park a school bus in 1920s driveway?
Takeaways for the wannabe professional museum person
Money is always going to be an issue - learn how to budget wisely, write grants, and schmooze with donors. This might be the biggest one. Why don't they teach this in Library School?
Tech is huge - the future belongs to the librarian with digital projects experience, not just scanning and creating databases, though. Everyone wants those large scale "value added" projects that add markup or tags to existing digital collections. I believe these are usually built in-house from scratch e.g. NYPL Labs (What's On the Menu? & Building Inspector were mentioned). This concerns me. I know that I don't have these kinds of skills - I can barely wrap my head around the concepts.
Learn your community - The CHS is an organization in transition because of its unique location. The local community today in downtown Hartford differs greatly from the community that founded the historical society and donated their personal collections 100 years ago. CHS staff works hard to provide the local community with events and programs to attract their interest. This makes pragmatic sense (no visitors=no museum) but it's a nice thing to see in library professions – CHS is not just concerned with presidential researchers in tweed blazers. An aspiring professional would learn how to get out into her community, how to network promote herself. Outreach seems to be the way of the future and I can't expect to just sit in a basement somewhere alone with old books.
Learn to work in groups/be team player - these all seemed like big group projects with lots of moving parts. Everyone also had a large number of outside contacts, be they volunteer groups or other local non-profits. No one gets to just work by themselves.
After the meeting I got to work on a new collection. B handed me a file box about 2/3 full and (politely) told to figure it out... This is what I figured...
THE BULLARD FAMILY
Pratt students know this address!
This is a collection of family papers to/from/and related to the Bullard family. Edward Payson Bullard (1841-1906) was a Connecticut industrialist who founded a company (variously known as the Bullard Company, the Bridgeport Machine Tool Works, the Bullard Machine Tool Works, and the Bullard Machine Tool Company) that existed in some from 1862-1900 and employed over 2,000 workers. According to a semi-hagiographic biography published by the Bullard Company in 1955, Edward P. Bullard was a self-made man who worked his way up in the world. I think that CHS hoped this collection might have information about his business dealings or technical data, but so far I’ve only seen banal family documents e.g. recipes, religious material (prayers/hymns) and family correspondence, all dating to within 10-15 years.
I was most interested in a series of letters written home from Mrs. Bullard in 1900. Edward had brought his wife along on a trip to Paris’ Exposition Universelle” in 1900 - trip arranged by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The Bullard’s visited Britain, Paris and Germany and most of this collection is their letters home to their children.
The more entertaining of these letters were written by Mrs. Bullard, who seemed very concerned with maintaining social etiquette while travelling. She filled her letters with more details from the train trips and hotel rooms and she skipped over the more momentous events happening on their trip. I know I shouldn’t have spent so much time reading once I figured out what I had, but it was so interesting to see a London vacation through this woman’s eyes. Her husband had gone ahead, so on her transatlantic crossing she had to have roommates – there was an English Woman (“a very pleasant person,”) a Swiss Woman (“remarkably nice, pleasant,”) and “Mrs. Dr. Helmouth’s maid (sic).” who turned out to be “entirely unobjectionable.” Mrs. Bullard did not like the idea of an upper berth “but Mrs. Roberts preferred it.” Louise (the maid) couldn’t sleep on the couch with the porthole open... Halfway into a letter exclusively about customs, train tickets, and a batch of the most luscious strawberries (“the nicest I ever saw,”) Mrs. Bullard remarked casually, “I presume you all know that father is here attending the meetings of the mechanical engineers.” Then she turns immediately back to her previous topic. “The train service was part of our trip so it cost me nothing.”
The Bullard’s vacation is interesting to probably no one but me or someone writing a social history of London and wanted a middle-class American’s viewpoint, but I could read a book of her observations on daily life. I found them inadvertently ironic, rude, and hilarious. “Thursday we went out in the afternoon and had a two hour ride on the top of a bus…of course you can seeeverything!” She skipped the A.S.M.E. reception at the Guildhall (where her husband was honored by the Lord Mayor) to rest up for an excursion to Warwick Castle the following evening “by special train.” She met the Countess of Warwick (“very pretty woman with beautiful auburn hair”) along with the Earl (“A good-looking Englishman, not at all handsome.”)
MY NOTES ON FOLDERS/CONTENT (IN NON-DACS COMPLIANT MISHMASH)
Folder 1: Edward P. Bullard - Correspondence
Folder 2: Alice Martha Camp Bullard - Correspondence
Folder 3: Elizabeth Brewster - Correspondence
Folder 4: Jessie Bullard - Incoming Correspondence
Folder 5: Mrs. H. B. Clark (Jessie Bullard Clark) - Favorite Recipes
Folder 6: Lucy Camp Correspondence
Folder 7: Alice Martha Camp Bullard - Correspondence