Johnson family

It is an accident of birth that my sister and I had these documents in our possession. It is not, however, an accident that we have chosen to donate them to the Carl A. Kroch Library here at Cornell. Over the years my sister and I have had a number of discussions about the deposition of these papers. Our first concern was preservation. Here in this facility our family records will be stored in a climate-controlled vault, kept as safe as humanly possible from floods, fire, earthquakes, and insects. Second, we wished to make the documents available to others. Here scholars and students will have the opportunity to work with the original documents rather than from a microfilm or xerox copy of them. Already undergraduate students have had a chance to read the family correspondence of John and Abigail Adams in its original form. Holding such a document in one's hands can alter one's sense of history; legendary figures come alive, they become human. And we could not have asked for greater access than to have the letters posted on the world-wide web. Kroch has admirably addressed our fundamental concerns.

Equally important to us was the character of the institution in which we placed the documents. It is understandable that so much of the interest in the collection is focused on the Adams' letters. But the Adamses, distinguished though they were, are only one branch of our family. The letters they wrote originated in Quincy, but their destination was Utica, New York. The history of the other branches of our family is embedded in that of this region. The archives here at Kroch already contain evidence of their presence here, their ties through marriage, commerce, politics and friendship with other families in the area. One of those many ties was to the Cornell family itself. Our grandfather's sister, Mary Savage Johnson, was a friend of Ezra Cornell's daughter, as the inscription in Mary Emily Cornell's autobiography testifies.

...