Family Papers Research Articles

MARY WILLIAMSON'S LETTER, OR, SEEING WOMEN AND SISTERS IN THE ARCHIVES OF ATLANTIC SLAVERY

ABSTRACT‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

Elizabeth Inchbald's Catholic Novel’ and Its Local Background

Elizabeth Inchbald'sA Simple Story(1791) was the first novel written by an English Catholic with Catholic characters. It was set in the world of the Catholic gentry, a world that Inchbald knew well from her upbringing in Suffolk on a farm adjacent to the estate of an ancient Catholic family. Inchbald herself acknowledged that one of the book's characters, the ex-Jesuit Sandford, was based on an individual from her childhood, and some effort has been made by Inchbald scholars (notably Patricia Sigl and Michael Tomko) to research her Catholic background and the Gage and Rookwood families whose history may have inspired aspects of the novel. However, the Gage family's papers have not been considered for the light they can throw on Inchbald and the eighteenth-century Catholic community in Suffolk. These sources contain references to the Simpson family and have the potential to enliven our understanding of the immediate environment of Inchbald's youth. This article corrects misconceptions transmitted by James Boaden and other biographers of Inchbald, proposes a new identity for the man who became the model for Sandford, and draws attention to possible correspondences between the circumstances and relationships of the Gage family and the characters inA Simple Story.

Personal Documentation in the Cold War

discussion will proceed from two assumptions: that we are in fact engaged in a cold war and that the important events in the life of the average man are documented in records which he must keep as his personal documentation if he is to meet the increasing demands of the state and society upon him. Since the maintenance of personal files presents a problem for most of us under normal circumstances, it remains for me to show that there are particular aspects of the problem for our generation of adult citizenry. Early in his administration President Eisenhower appointed a special assistant uto see that all departments of the Government speak and act as one in fighting the cold war. Although this statement of Mr. Jackson's functions is that of the Washington Post reporter and not of the President, it is significant that Mr. Adams, the President's assistant, so far recognized the temperature of the war in which the United States is engaged as to announce that Mr. Jackson would have uspecial responsibilities in the cold-war planning of this Administration. 2 It might be profitable to examine this new official concept, which suggests that cold-war planning is different from the ordinary kind of war planning, but I am concerned with it in this paper only because it enables me to assume fairly that the cold war is a fact. My second assumption that no one of us can escape his domestic filing duties is considerably less debatable, for the problems involved in the management of the family archives and the means employed to solve them exactly parallel the problems and solutions found in business or government. Thus, as in the case of any civic bureau, the keeper of the family's papers (however strong his inclination toward central filing) will permit decentralization of papers to the extent that, for example, the card file of favorite