The Weld-Grimké Family Papers: Hands On to Online
By Digitization Specialist Ella Johnson
In a recent blog post, we began to explore the Weld-Grimké family correspondences which the digitization team at the Clements have been working for the last year to digitize and make accessible online. The correspondences represent the big, complicated, fascinating lives of Sarah, Angelina, Theodore and their family through the 19th century and vast political and personal changes. I had the honor of digitizing this collection, letter by letter, over the last year and getting to intimately know this family. Today, I want to continue with some of the themes which drew me into this collection and a bit about the process of digitizing this collection.
One of the stories which held my attention throughout these papers was the family legacy of the Grimké sisters and their work. After their deaths, Angelina, Sarah, and Theodore’s work for social justice was carried on by the activists who fought to increase the rights of the most vulnerable and through their family who passed down their legacy. Sarah Grimké Weld Hamilton, the only daughter of the family, is well represented in the collection, tracking her own growth from child to mother and her movements from Massachusetts to Michigan. Her daughter, Angelina Weld Hamilton, would go on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Michigan Medical school and would work as a doctor in rural Idaho for many years. It is through Sarah Hamilton’s son’s family that many of the papers in this collection found their way to the Clements. Late in their lives, Angelina and Sarah discovered that they had nephews from their brother who remained in South Carolina and one of the women who he enslaved. These young men, who had been born into slavery, had struggled their way to freedom to become a lawyer and a reverend. Throughout the letters of the 1870s and 1880s the sisters and Theodore include fond mentions of “Archie” (Archibald Grimké) and “Frank” (Francis Grimké) visiting town, coming over for dinner, and building families of their own. While Sarah and Angelina lived to see some of the goals, like the abolition of slavery, others would be experienced by their descendants, like universal suffrage.
Eagleswood Academy photograph album, Sarah Grimké Weld
In addition to being abolitionists and women’s rights activists, the Weld-Grimké family was on the cutting edge of political and moral concepts for their whole lives. Be it religion, diet, medicine, or education, they were interested in non-normative ways of living. These papers provide fascinating, ground-level details about how these beliefs and ways of life impacted the lives of those who adopted them. From diet movements like Free Produce or the Graham diet, to the apocalyptic prophecies of Millerism, to medical treatments like the water cure, these sisters and the rest of their family were continually drawn into new ways of living in a constant effort to improve themselves and society. It is easy to look at the portraits of Angelina and Sarah and see stern, stodgy, buttoned up women, and while they did hold fast to their beliefs and the rules they developed, in many ways they were rebellious, radical, and revolutionary.
Photograph of Sarah Moore Grimké, c.1870’s
These three, Sarah, Angelina, and Theodore lived big, complicated lives and left behind a record through their correspondences, diaries, and photographs. The collection of photographs, including a book of pictures presented to Theodore by the community at Eagleswood school, were digitized by Chris Ridgway in the last year and will join the correspondence online. Sarah and Angelina’s diaries have been digitized and are totally available online. These journals are a more personal private reflection on their lives. The correspondences, in comparison, reflect the relationships and social networks of these thinkers.
As part of the digitization process, I wrote extensive metadata and updated the existing writer index. Each letter had to be described with metadata including, dates, writers, recipients, and locations. Then each letter was scanned and the images were edited, color corrected, and put into sequence. This process meant that each letter was handled, every page was turned, and any notes were documented. Spending a year with these letters, I began to recognize the handwriting of the writers and felt as though I got to know them through their complaints, celebrations, and mundane comments. Again and again, I found myself drawn down a research rabbit hole, spending more time than may have been wise trying to track down exactly who wrote this letter and how they related into the network of the Grimké sisters. In this process, surprising connections revealed themselves in names that appear again and again. Families like the Chaces sprawl throughout the collection, while names like Theodora Weld Howells clearly honor those who came before. As part of this research, I moved between reading some of the secondary literature and following their citations which provided me with another lens to understand how this material serves as a primary source for a spectrum of different research. Hopefully with online access to the collection others will feel the same draw to the stories in these letters, prompting new research and reevaluation of past scholarship.
Soon nearly 3,500 letters will be hosted on our website and publicly available for researchers from around the world. As these letters become more accessible, I hope that other people can get to know these incredible people through the words they left behind. I feel deeply fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with them and I’m beyond excited to share them with the world. These papers may have been written 200 years ago, but our understanding of them and the people behind them is constantly dynamic and evolving.
Digitized letter from Sarah Moore Grimké to Sarah Grimké Weld, undated]. I love this sweet note with sketch from Sarah to her niece.