Love in the Archives #loveheritage

In honor of Valentine's Day, archivists and librarians on Twitter are using #loveheritage to showcase romantic materials from their collections. Many are writing blog posts about collection finds related to love. It's a great collaborative endeavor with a few fun things already posted and presumably much more to be posted tomorrow.

Today, the North Carolina State Archives warmed us up with their fabulous post "Love in the Archives" http://ncarchives.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/love-in-the-archives/ .

Last year I shared a couple of themed cards from antique shops to celebrate the day:
http://archivesinfo.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-finds-at-local-antique-shop-love.html
http://archivesinfo.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-finds-at-local-antique-shop.html

This year, I want to share a book with you that was given to me by my thoughtful friend and fabulous dance teacher, Amanda. The book Love Letters Lost by Babette Hines includes what archivists would call an "artificial collection" of individual orphan letters including "Hine's treasure trove of love letters and vintage photographs devotedly at collected at flea markets and auctions..." Each letter gives us a glimpse into the life and loving relationship highlighted by its writer. The letters leave room for the romantic to imagine the full lost story of devotion (and sometimes heartache) between lovers, friends, and family.

The book consists of original copies as well as typescripts of some letters. Despite being puzzled by how they decided which letters needed typed versions and which did not, I am thoroughly enchanted with this volume and the idea behind it. The language in these letters pulls my heartstrings and makes me warm up to what I might sometimes see as overly gushy sentiment. Here is a sample:


                                                       August 26th 1890
Dear Miss Ada,


You will think strange of me for writing these few lines, but I get to see you alone so seldom, I cannot resist.
And besides I cannot half express my love for you in words.
Had I the eloquence of Cicero, or the pen of burns, it would be impossible for me to tell you half the love I have for you.
I love you better than any living creature, and no one knows, save the One above, how happy I would be if you could return my love.
When you seem to treat me cool, my life is a misery to me; and when you are the reverse, my happiness knows no bounds. 
Oh please don't turn from me coldly.
Will you not give me some encouragement? Can I not yet have some hopes?


I am yours most devotedly,
J.L. Slagle

Poor lovesick fellow!

I am looking forward to following #loveheritage to see what my fellow archivists share from their archives. Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

More Finds at the Local Antique Shop: Are Archivists Just Nosy?

Vandalia, Illinois
October 2, 1921


Mr Dear Aunt Mary and Uncle Wilbur,


You will no doubt be very much surprised to hear from me, especially after all of these years. And I hope that you will forgive and pardon the appearant [sic] neglect for it really was not exactly my fault. I often wished to write to you and the rest, but I always felt that Mother & Evelyn had always said and written unkind things of me, because in the letters which did come from home I was rarely if ever mentioned. It sometimes almost breaks my heart to think of the way our home has been broken up. I do not even know where Mother is, and that is one reason why I am writing to you, in hopes that you may know, and will send me her address. I believe that Evelyn knows where she is, but she will not tell me, and says that she does not know. the last that I saw or heard from Mamma was a year ago.....
Then I went to visit Evelyn where I was very much unwelcome, not by her husband who is rather nice but her owing to the fact that I had left most of my things in her care during my stay in Decatur, and she had used most of them and didn't really care to give them up. some of the things she locked away upon my arrival at her home, and claimed that Mother had taken them with her,such as silver ware & tabel [sic] linen and a few other things some of these I found and most of them I did not...


First of all, from this little paragraph I wonder, do you think Aunt Mary and Uncle Wilbur were happy to hear from this apparently long lost relative?

I found this letter among a batch I purchased online as a sort of potluck. Letters like this are sold online and advertised for use in heirloom craft projects. Purchasers are encouraged to cut up the letters and use them for collages. I prefer to purchase them, read them, and lament the fact that they have been separated from their families in this way.

My purchased lot of four letters are from the years 1921-22 and include some details of everyday family life. I know about the family baby. I learn from the letters about the domestic lives of the women in the household. They describe preparing beans and cakes. This is a farming family and the few letters in my possession discuss growing  crops and managing livestock. The letters include lots of names - individuals who are ill, suffering business losses, taking time off. I get just a small sense of this family's life, as if I am allowed to visit each family member for an hour and then asked to go. I will never know these people. They probably don't want me to know them this way. I have a decided picture in my mind of what these people were like, but I formed this opinion about them with very little information

I'm nosy. I want to know more. I want to be asked to stay for a longer visit and get to know these people. I want to learn more about farm life in Iowa in the 1920s. Is there a better way to learn it then through the original letters of farming families who were right in the thick of it all? The collection, that I suppose would give me a full and realistic sense of these people based on the detail of the letters before me, has been destroyed. We will never be able to reassemble the original collection of letters from which these were obviously plucked. The loss of personal papers such as these are a loss for our better understanding of our culture. Our memories of our ancestors also suffer from this loss. Finally, the nosy archivist is left disappointed that the resolution to this family soap opera, for which the letter I quote gives us a glimpse, has been lost to time. These are just clips from life, out of context.

Encounters with the Original

There is nothing like encountering an original.

In the 1990s, while working as a full-time archivist in a local repository, a fabulous donation came across my desk. I remember opening an envelope and pulling out letters written by Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, and other famous men from United States history. My hands shook. My whole body shook as I kept myself from running across the library to the office of my boss to tell her of our acquisition.

I touched history and it was electrifying.

Letter by Marquis de Lafayette dated 1831 with translation.
Courtesy Waltham Public Library, Waltham, Massachusetts.

Touching the original gave me a physical connection to the amazing characters I had read about in texts. Imagining these men sitting at their desks and putting their quills to these pieces of paper stimulated my senses. Thinking about how these papers survived time in someone's attic to arrive on my desk almost 300 years later was mind boggling. They were simple letters of thanks, politics, and an order for supplies. Things change. Things stay the same. We are all tied by a common thread of humanity highlighted in the day-to-day activities that keep us all going.

I was reminded today of the value of encountering the original, though in this case it wasn't actually physically touching a unique piece of history. An article announced that the "Final set of Tudor and Stuart state secrets goes online today." Then I found an article announcing that among these materials are Henry VIII's Love Letters to Anne Boleyn. I grew woozy again. I wanted to run to my someone to tell them of my remarkable find. But, alas, I work in a home office and no one else was home. I had to satisfy myself with tweeting and Facebooking. (If "archive" can be used as a verb, as in "archiving," so can Facebook!)

Henry VIII has always been a fascination of mine. I cannot say that I am a "fan," but his unique life and the distinct changes in society that took place after his reign have excited my brain cells for years. I had never seen a letter written by the King. I had never thought to look for them quite honestly. The good archivists at the National Archives of the UK, like so many forward thinking archivists, were busy preparing their treasure trove for easy access through digitization. Seeing Henry's beautiful handwriting was indeed a treat. Thinking about his "love letters," despite the unusual circumstances of the affair, invited parallels once again to that thread of humanity I envision. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I tweeted about a modern set of love letters that has been digitized by the Houston Library. (Ah, l'amour!)

Perhaps one day I'll get to touch an actual royal letter. For now, I'm satisfied with getting to see it.

More Finds at the Local Antique Shop - What's Old is New

One of the most wonderful things about archives is their ability to connect the past to the present. Consider this nineteenth century postcard of two women sharing letters. As soon as I saw it, I thought of my best girlfriends. They are the women who are always there for me and who love me for who I am no matter what. They are the ones who always make me feel comfortable and at ease. They are the people with whom I share a laugh and who can make me happy even when I am in a terrible mood. Women's relationships have not changed all that much, have they?

This image reminds me of passing letters back and forth to high school pals, giggling over confessed secrets and prizing an unspoken understanding between us. I feel as if  these women and I are part of some exclusive historical club of female bonding that is only separated by time. I was pleased to turn over the card to see written in pencil "my girlfriends May Doyle and Inez, Rose - Pearl Brown." Attaching names to faces, even if it never brings me more information than that, gives me another connection to these sisters from the past.

Lately, I have been talking a lot about communities as my colleague Sue West and I grow our "Life in Context" program. In addition to my connections to my girlfriends and to these women of the past, there is another connection at work with this image. I bought this postcard from an online site. I am a regular buyer here on this site, so I feel a community connection to it. Another thing I get out of this postcard is a connection to the particular woman who packaged it. She always packages my purchases carefully, includes a nice handwritten note, and puts a few "freebie" images inside the envelope for me. When I open the envelope, I get a whiff of a pleasant floral fragrance that reminds me of my grandmother. I wonder if the woman's house smells like this scent or if she specifically spritzes items that leave her possession as a little extra something special (This is not good from a preservation standpoint, but lovely from an old-fashioned, reminiscing, making something more personal standpoint.)

Archives have the ability to make us feel part of things larger than ourselves. I wish that I could meet these women, but I already feel as if I know them.

Boston's Diarist: 18th Century Diary Breathes Life into History

Recently I visited the crypt at the old North Church in Boston. It is a fascinating, hallowed place where hundreds of Bostonians are interred. Resurrecting a Storied Past is a good short video showing the inside of the tomb and describing research that is being done to preserve the history of the space and the individuals who are buried there. One particular item caught my eye as I explored. Propped against the wall was this marker for the spire and church bells that reads, "...This peal of eight bells the first made for the British Empire in North America was proposed by Gidney Clark of Barbadoes cast by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester in England in 1744 and transported free by John Roe the Diarist..." I wondered about John Roe and why it was significant to mention that he was a "diarist."

In a paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society and published in 1895, Edward L. Pierce discussed the value of the Rowe diary. He states,

The other printed diaries [among the MA Historical Society holdings] cover a briefer period than Rowe's; and their authors, or most of them, have a standpoint different from his. Several of them, like Rowe, have much to say of the weather; but that part of his record is omitted in this summary. Rowe himself, without being an acute observer of men and events, was an intelligent merchant ; and while we could wish he had reserved a part of the space which he gave to the ever-recurring names of persons whom lie met at dinners and clubs for a record of the opinions they expressed, still there remains much which illustrates the public and social life of Boston at this eventful period. 

In 1903. the letters and diary of Rowe were published by his great-great niece. She stated that she wanted the published for reasons of preservation. So that her ancestor's words would "be put beyond the possibility of loss." The high value placed on these materials is notable to me. We recognized the rarity of the item in its age, its unusual point of view, and its value in displaying "public and social life" during an eventful period. The introduction to the diary provides wonderful context for this wealthy merchant's life. His writing, as well as our long-term study and appreciation of it, is a fabulous example of the value of personal archives.

Lost Letters

Most of us now correspond through e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and texting. However, the sending of bits and bytes has only been our prime form of written communication for about ten years. People still retain old written letters from friends and family, personal notes and greetings, and formal correspondence in file boxes and cabinets. Written expression has been a major form of communication since the beginning of civilized society. We first exchanged ideas in writing on rocks and cave walls and later moved to papyrus and other more portable forms that allowed our writing to become more prolific. Digital resources have made it even easier to jot down our thoughts, continuing the evolutionary process of our writing. We must view all the various written ways we communicate as a whole, saving what is most important for ourselves and posterity.

It is interesting to note that in addition to the format change, the evolution of correspondence has changed what we say and how we say it. For one, correspondence tools allow us to give information to many people at once rather than sending one message at a time. We can do this to specific people with e-mail, but we can also spread a message to strangers via social networking sites. Things that were once private are now becoming public. Additionally, as we share more and more, we write fewer and fewer words in one shot to do it. Since social networks and e-mail are virtually free, and we can make use of them with tools that are available to us at any time. We are tending to write in short bursts and more often than in the past. It is now uncommon for one to sit and write an in-depth description of one’s week to mail off to a far off loved one. Many would rather just write something such as, “Baby took 1^st steps this morn” on our Facebook wall and let a back-and-forth dialogue ensue.

As technology makes the communication itself easier, in many ways it makes the saving of collections of correspondence related to our lives more difficult. On the good side, E-mail has made it easier for us to save copies of our correspondence. In the past, one had to make a concerted effort to make carbon copies of our letters or to photocopy them before sending if we wanted to retain back and forth communiqués. Today, our computer systems keep both sides of correspondence within our software programs, so we can easily see what someone has written to us alongside our reply. But how do we separate the important e-mails from the doldrums and what about those text messages, blog posts, and tweets? The Library of Congress has announced a program to “archive” Tweets, but we do not yet know how your ancestors may be able to access them in the future.

A box of printed letters to you may be missing your replies, but at least your ancestors (and possibly historians) will have a complete view of the words others wrote to you. How many people think about how family might be able to treasure your e-mails and other digitized words? It is advantageous for those of us thinking about the value of our correspondence to use programs that back up Twitter and Facebook accounts. Keep your important and interesting e-mails organized in folders and think of these folders as you would the old fashioned kind. Label them so the files inside make sense and are easily accessible. Also, be aware that digital files can be lost in the blink of an eye. Make 2 copies of everything. Keep the copies in alternate formats and retain one off site. Be prepared to migrate the data as technology keeps changing. For small home collections, it is always acceptable to print what is most important to you and save it the old fashioned way, in preservation safe folders, just to be sure. (For more on preservation see Preserving Archives and Personal Papers and "Preservation" heading on Links to Helpful Archives and Cultural Heritage Web Sites within the ArchivesInfo web pages.)

We are in the midst of a great change in communication. For now, we must still keep an eye toward the old way of doing things while automation changes rapidly. The cross over to a digital world is only just beginning. The implications of lost correspondence is troubling for both the purpose of scholarship and family / community memory.

Here are a few interesting online sources highlighting the importance of maintaining correspondence and the battle to save letters:

Literary Letters: Lost in Cyberspace

PBS: The Perilous Fight: Archiving War Letters

Personal Archiving Conference