Guest Post by Sofie Koonce, PAS Intern

Studying history often becomes an exercise in puzzle solving. 

One of my internship tasks has been transcribing letters to and from members of the Spooner family. The majority of the ones that I looked at were written by Esther S. Spooner (1835-1892) to her parents, Ephraim and Mary Elizabeth Spooner. The letters mention her brother, James Walter Spooner, and his wife, Sophronia “Frona” Smith, as well as their daughter, Maud, and sons, Walter and James. 

Beyond the immediate family, I found myself faced with a cast of unfamiliar characters from the extended Spooner family. It was important that I learned who these people were so that I could better understand the dynamics between them. In order to do that, I turned to genealogy.

The Antiquarian Society has a genealogy of the Spooner family that helped me immensely in untangling the web of names mentioned in various letters. However, repetition of names within the family was not uncommon, so I had to rely on context clues to figure out which person by that name was being referred to. These clues were often things like titles—Aunt, Uncle, Cousin—or indications of a person’s age. Sometimes combinations of names were helpful as well. For example, if Esther Spooner referred to a Hannah and Charles together, it was generally safe to assume that she meant her Aunt Hannah (Bartlett) Spooner, whose son was named Charles W. Spooner. 

As I went through the letters, I found a couple written in 1871 that confused me. In them, Esther Spooner referred to a man named George. From the context provided in the letters, I inferred that George was her husband, but the genealogy I had told me that Esther Spooner married a Horace S. Shepard. 

I turned to Ancestry to see if I could confirm Esther’s marriage to either Horace Shepard or the unknown George. A record of marriage revealed that Esther Spooner married a George Sawyer in 1862. So who was Horace Shepard? Right there, on the same document, I found that Horace married a Hannah B. Spooner. The two couples were married on the same date (August 9, 1862) in the same place (Sharon Springs, NY).

I now understood how Esther’s husband could have easily been incorrectly identified as Horace B. Shepard by a genealogist who mixed up the two Spooner brides. I concluded that Esther and Hannah must be cousins. However, in the Spooner family genealogy I could not find a Hannah B. Spooner who would have been 23 in 1862. Although her parents are named on the marriage record, I could not match them to anyone listed in the genealogy either. Back to Ancestry!

Eventually PAS Executive Director Anne Mason successfully identified Hannah as the granddaughter of Bourne and Hannah (Bartlett) Spooner of Plymouth. Bourne, the founder of the Plymouth Cordage Company, was the brother of Esther’s mother, Mary. Hannah was the eldest child of Bourne’s son, William, and his first wife, Lucy (Gibbs) Spooner. Lucy died when Hannah was only a toddler and she was raised by her grandparents. Eventually her father moved to Michigan and remarried, but Hannah remained in Plymouth. She and Esther were first cousins once removed. Although members of a different generation of their family, they were only four years apart in age. The story of their double wedding is a fascinating one that we are saving for a future post!

While the family genealogy was a helpful resource, nothing beats primary sources—though even those can be misleading sometimes! 

I’m a very visual person, so I found that transferring the information from the genealogy into a family tree helped me to understand the connections. Laying everything out in one place made it much easier to see how relationships worked within the family. Below is just one part of the sprawling Spooner family tree, with the names and dates that I’ve been able to correct or add so far.

Genealogical research is one way I’ve been getting to know the Spooner family. Reading their words to each other and learning the natures of their relationships has brought them to life. One of my favorite parts of studying history is the reminders that people from the past were just as human as we are today, and those reminders are a key part of the puzzle that we solve to gain a more complete understanding of history.

Sofie Koonce is a junior at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where she is a Classics major with a concentration in Book Studies. The Book Studies concentration program encourages students to delve into the world of the written and printed word and explore careers that involve working with manuscripts and printed materials. Sofie is back in her hometown of Plymouth interning with the Antiquarian Society remotely during the winter term. Post graduation, she plans to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Data Science. 

Guest Post by Sofie Koonce, PAS Intern

One of my internship projects is transcribing the Russell family journal. This manuscript was for many years misidentified as the journal of just one person: Catherine Elliott Russell (1840-1916). A closer look reveals that it was kept by multiple members of the Russell family, who would take turns making entries. The Russells lived at 32 Court Street in the beautiful “Russell Manor” and were a wealthy, well educated, and very social family. The Russells began this journal in February of 1863 and continued it through February of 1864. There are also a few entries at the end from 1904, when the journal was rediscovered by one of the surviving family members.

Transcribing a family journal can be a little more complicated than transcribing a letter, especially when the journal’s several authors don’t make a habit of signing off their entries. It becomes even more confusing when authors refer to themselves by name instead of in the first person, which means I can’t assume they didn’t write the entry if they’re mentioned in it. As a part of the transcription process, I’ve been attempting to figure out which family members wrote what. A lot of this comes down to handwriting analysis. There are essentially two steps: 1. parsing out different handwritings and 2. matching those handwritings to people. 

Some family members have distinct handwriting, which makes it much easier to identify their entries. Other family members have handwriting that appears the same at a glance (and sometimes at more than a glance…) which is significantly trickier. In those cases, I have to look at little quirks that characterize each person’s handwriting. 

In the picture above, the entries for Sunday, April 26 and Monday, April 27, 1863 were written by two different people, Catherine Elliott Russell and her sister, Anna Russell (1835-1900). When placed directly next to each other like this, it’s easier to see that they’re different, but they are similar enough to be confusing. I had to look closely.

One of the things that really helped me was how the sisters wrote the dates. Catherine typically underlined the “th” after the date once or twice. Anna would underline the “th” and then draw two dots underneath it, as seen here. The difference is slight, but consistent. Also, Catherine draws the tails of lowercase letters (y, g, j) curving to the right, while Anna more traditionally loops them. 

There are a few entries initialed by Catherine and Anna that can serve as a guide for decoding their handwriting. On the entries from Saturday, April 18th and Sunday, April 19th (pictured below) I noticed that the sisters have distinct ways of writing capital Rs and Bs. Catherine writes a downstroke, then lifts her pen to make the rest of the letter. Anna loops the downstroke into the rest of the letter, creating a noticeably different result.

These small differences were particularly helpful when the handwriting samples weren’t adjacent. Most often, I was using Catherine’s distinctive tails to pick out her handwriting. It is not surprising that the sisters might have similar handwriting, but being able to pick up on their unique quirks is key to telling them apart!

How did the journal become part of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society’s archival collection? In 1871 Catherine married William Hedge (1840-1919), the youngest son of Thomas and Lydia Hedge, owners of what is now the Hedge House Museum. Catherine inherited the Russell family home at 32 Court Street after her father’s death in 1875. It was here that she and William raised their three children (daughter Lucia and twins William and Henry). Possibly the journal remained in the house until it was given to the Society by Russell/Hedge family descendants. The Society’s collections include many objects and manuscripts collected by Catherine, who was interested in saving records of Plymouth’s past, especially those produced or used by women: needlework samplers, clothing, and recipes.

Sofie Koonce is a junior at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where she is a Classics major with a concentration in Book Studies. The Book Studies concentration program encourages students to delve into the world of the written and printed word and explore careers that involve working with manuscripts and printed materials. Sofie is back in her hometown of Plymouth interning with the Antiquarian Society remotely during the winter term. Post graduation, she plans to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Data Science.