The Swanton family history represented in this collection can be traced matrilineally through six generations to Margaret Lewis, who married William Gay. The family settled in Maine, a regional connection that continued for generations. The Gays, here represented primarily by papers of Margaret Lewis Gay's four grandchildren-- Olive Gay Worcester, Laura Gay Davis, Dorcas Gay, and Rufus Marble Gay -- was a respected and prominent family; before her marriage, Laura Gay lived in Portugal (1822-24) with her grandmother and step-grandfather, General Henry Dearborn, the latter being President Monroe's minister to that country. The Gay family history is marked by many early deaths and by a constant struggle against illness.
Olive Gay's marriage to Henry A. Worcester linked the Gays of Maine with the Worcesters of New Hampshire. HAW was the brother of Joseph Emerson Worcester, the noted lexicographer. As a Swedenborgian minister, HAW traveled and preached in Massachusetts and Maine before his early death left his wife to raise their son and daughter alone.
The daughter, Mary Olivia Worcester, married Walter Scott Swanton, whose early death in turn left her a widow with three young children. MOWS's numerous letters to her youngest son, John Reed Swanton, record the Swedenborgian faith and strong moral precepts that guided her and her children. After her husband's death, she returned to Gardiner, Maine, to raise her children but spent her later years in Boston with her friend Ednah Silver. JRS earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard in 1900, and became an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution. At times accompanied by his wife, he traveled to Oklahoma, the Southwest, and Alaska, participating in many of the early studies of American Indian and Eskimo cultures
From the guide to the Papers, 1759-1955, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)
