Several years ago I was researching a Colonial Dames lineage case. At the start, I only had one source that listed the parents of a man named Oliver Everett Manning. That source was the Manning genealogy written about a hundred years ago. The genealogy had no source citations. That was a severe problem. Dames standards require a citation to a source that would be acceptable in itself, such as vital records, Bible records, church records, etc.
Spurred on by a manuscript catalog, I made two trips, one to see the Manning family association files and one to see the Manning genealogy manuscript.
The family association files are stored in the Center for Lowell History on French Street in Lowell, Massachusetts. There I found several archival boxes from the Manning family association. The boxes contained documents and artifacts. I found a photograph of Oliver's daughter and a letter from her own daughter about her lineage. I was dismayed to find that a box of artifacts was full of mold. Not a good feeling.
The Manning genealogy manuscript was at the New England Historic Genealogical Society on Newbury Street in Boston. There were two parts to this manuscript. One was a set of files for the households discussed in the genealogy. Each family had a file folder which contained the handwritten manuscript for that family. On the back of each sheet of paper were notations consisting of numbers in two colors. Some were red and some were blue. The boxes for the family files were beautiful. With the information from the published book, the archivist at NEHGS was able to locate the file for me immediately.
This perfect organization was not true for two of the Manning boxes. Those boxes contained correspondence. The letters were still folded into their envelopes and stacks of envelopes were tied together with red string. Some envelopes had numbers written on them. By extrapolation, I came to believe that the blue numbers were for letters outgoing from the author while the red numbers were for letters he received. As I opened letters and unfolded them, the archivist stood beside me and placed them flat into acid buffered folders. After an afternoon of unfolding, I was unable to find the exact letters whose numbers noted the ancestry of Oliver from the manuscript pages.
My dismaying experience with Manning correspondence differs from my experience with the Jacobus correspondence at the Connecticut Historical Society on Elizabeth Street in Hartford, Connecticut. There the letters are filed by correspondent's name in chronological order. The files include not only the letters addressed to Jacobus but also the carbon copies of the letters he sent.
No archives will have the time to put my files together after the fact. No archivist will understand how I organize unless I organize it before they accession it. What I learned from this research exercise was that I have to submit organized files in the first place. The Manning family files were easy to use. The Jacobus correspondence is easy to navigate. I can duplicate those approaches.
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