Collection consists of material related to and generated by descendants of Christopher Sower, in particular David Sower (1764-1835) and his daughter Eliza Angeline Sower March (1805-1862), wife of Isaac March. It is comprised of three letters, three manuscript volumes, four photographs, a small group of newspaper clippings, and one genealogical chart published in 1887. One letter is to David Sower from the London firm of Brook Watson & Co., 1791, regarding a financial settlement; the other two letters are to Eliza Angeline Sower March, one from her father in 1832, describing a mass baptism that had taken place in the Schuylkill River at Norristown, and the other an 1862 note from her brother David (1794-1865), in which he mentions their long estrangement and asks for her forgiveness. The photographs include one tintype, and are all unidentified portraits except for one salted paper print of a cousin, Cecelia Sower Rhinehart. The newspaper clippings (1902, 1924, undated) concern members of the Sower family. Two of the three commonplace books are nineteenth-century sentiment albums owned by women, and are good examples of that popular genre. The first was kept by Eliza Angeline Sower March, and is inscribed "Dedicated to Friendship, Feeling & Sentiment / Eliza A. Sower." Published by Charles Wells of New York, it was a blank book that was filled in with poems, including odes to Washington, Lafayette, and Niagara Falls, entered in various hands (some with signatures) between 1830 and 1840, and in 1859. The album was issued with four engravings: an untitled and unsigned re-engraving of "The Mother's Grave" frontispiece by Edward Francis Finden (1791-1857) after Richard Westall (1765-1836) for the gift book Forget Me Not (London: R. Ackermann, 1827); "View of the Ruins of Ticonderoga Forts on Lake Champlain" by Gideon Fairman (1774-1827) after Hugh Reinagle (1790-1834) for the Analectic Magazine (1818); and two untitled and unsigned images. The second volume, titled Album of Gems (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, undated), was a blank book issued with four engravings by C. Kneller of Stuttgart ("Amani," "Charlotte von Hagn," "Die Mordnacht von Luzerne," and "Die Ùˆberraschung"). It was presented to Eliza's daughter Mary Jane March Todd (1842-1914) "by her friend J. P. Brooke" of Norristown in 1857, and then filled with personalized sentimental verse and autographs by friends and family through 1889. Accompanying that volume are two family record leaves removed from a nineteenth-century Bible and inscribed with genealogical information for the Todd family. The third volume was owned by an unidentified David Sower; undated but earlier than the other two, it contains mostly blank pages with manuscript genealogical notes, two recipes, and pages of passages copied from the Psalms of David in both English and German. The published chart is titled Genealogical chart of the descendants of Christopher Sower, printer, of Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa., compiled by Charles G. Sower (Philadelphia: C. G. Sower, 1887). Spanning eight generations of the family, it was printed on four sheets of paper that were overlapped and glued together to make an overall size of 314 by 106 centimeters (approximately 124 by 42 inches), and was designed to be read in sections without unfolding the whole. It is accompanied by its original presentation box (number 84). Charles Sower published the charts for private distribution to family members and institutions, with the understanding that they would never be sold by the recipients.
