Paul family papers 1834-ca.1936.

ArchivalResource

Paul family. Paul family papers 1834-ca.1936.

Paul family papers 1834-ca.1936.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/244437435

The collection consists of letters, genealogical notes and newspaper clippings, and photographs from three generations of the Paul family of Woodstock, Barnard and Windsor, Vermont and environs. The letters that Mary Stiles Paul (b. 1830) wrote to her father, Bela Paul, between 1845 and 1862, when she worked in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills and the North American Phalanx, make up a sizable portion of the collection, and have been well documented by scholars. Both Mary Stiles Paul and her niece, Mary Briggs Paul, were genealogists. Mary Briggs Paul's 1920s and 1930s newspaper clippings and handwritten genealogy notes occupy more than half of the collection. Three letters to Bela Paul (1792-1863), then living in Woodstock or Barnard, from his wife's siblings between 1834 and 1845 are among the oldest in the collection. In November 1845, his sister, Sarah, wrote that his daughter, Mary (Stiles Paul), left Woodstock for Lowell, Massachusetts and assured him that she had money, had help to get "a place," and was "comfortably prepared for her journey." Mary Stiles Paul's letters to her father begin in the summer of 1845, when she expresses her desire to go to Lowell and requests his consent (she is only fifteen years old). She worked in Lowell for four years and her letters during this period reflect her increasing social and economic independence. Her letters also span the time Mary Stiles Paul spent living at the North American Phalanx, a utopian agricultural community in Red Bank, New Jersey, which she joined shorly after leaving Lowell. Mary Stiles Paul worked at the North American Phalanx until its failure in 1855. Mary Stiles Paul's letters are very accessible. Transcriptions and abstracts are filed with the letters in the collection. Other letters in the collection include several from William Paul to his sister, Mary, written between 1860 and 1865. William moved to Tennessee before the Civil War, where he was engaged in business. He expressed concern about their father's ill-health and eventual death, as well as his own domestic troubles. Although the collection includes many genealogy clippings and notes, most of which belonged to Mary Briggs Paul when she traced her family history, they are difficult to use. The clippings are, for the most part, from the Boston Evening Transcript, Genealogical Department in the 1920s and 1930s.

.5 linear feet.

Vermont Historical Society