Moore, Blount, and Cowper family papers, 1789-1990.
Title:
Moore, Blount, and Cowper family papers, 1789-1990.
The collection consists of correspondence, legal papers, volumes, pictures, family history, and other materials documenting the Moore, Blount, and Cowper families, as well as the Boddie, Coapman, Gatling, Grimes, Keeble, Ruffin, and Williams families of North Carolina. Nineteenth-century correspondence includes family letters, some mother-to-daughter and father-to-daughter, that offer a glimpse into plantation life, including social news, child-rearing, child mortality, epidemic illness, death during childbirth, courtship, and news about slaves, in antebellum North Carolina. Other 19th-century letters support ending the Civil War and discuss business affairs, agriculture, medicine, slavery, and academics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Of particular note are copies of letters exchanged by B.F. Moore and Governor W.W. Holden in 1866 that discuss an 1863 conversation they had with Governor Zebulon Vance regarding further prosecution of the war. Twentieth-century correspondence consists chiefly of a series of Olivia Blount Cowper Moore letters exchanged with a French soldier during World War I; letters from her friend with a children's clothing enterprise during the 1930s; frequent social correspondence, including invitations and greeting cards (bulk 1960s); and sympathy letters. Other 20th-century correspondence concerns business affairs, the Episcopal Church, genealogy, and potential Communist indoctrination at North Carolina State University. Legal materials consist of bonds, deeds, indentures, and cadastral maps regarding land and slaves, chiefly in Wake County, N.C., and in Alabama. There is also an 1852 list of slaves, where they lived, and from whom they were bought; wills and related estate materials for many family members; and account books, scrapbooks, and other volumes that document estate settlements, family life, women's social life and customs, the Civil War, World War I, arts and cultural entertainment, influenza, the Episcopal Church, and various other subjects. Pictures depict family members and others and are primarily black-and-white photographic prints, some card-mounted, but there also are daguerreotypes, tintypes, and other formats. Family history materials include genealogical correspondence, biographical materials, and a record of slave births, circa 1828-1847. Most slave materials relate to North Carolina, but there are also items about slavery in Alabama and Texas. Also included are family bibles, a history of the Boddie family, blueprints for several family houses, a small amount of financial material, miscellaneous writings by family members and others, a mid-19th-century recipe for a medicinal cure for ague and the fever, Civil War pardons, newspaper clippings and other printed material, and World War II ration coupons and inspection records.
ArchivalResource:
ca. 1300 items (12.0 linear feet)
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38226967 View
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