As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been spending a lot of time working on who was in the Club and where these women lived. Going through all of the names can be overwhelming but also extremely interesting.

Just looking at where women who are non-residents and honorary members is interesting in itself. There are women from California and even England and Paris who are a part of this club.

Something that I have found very helpful if I cannot figure out the spelling of a name is to Google search what I think the name is and then this also sometimes leads to help me learn more about who the women are. The biggest difficulty that I am coming up with is that there are many women who went by their husband’s name, as was customary of the time. I have been able to find some interesting information about some of the men and also some women too.

One woman, Miss Octavia Bates, is originally from Detroit and graduated from Ann Arbor University which is quite a feet for a woman from this time. She was mentioned speaking at many different events in different magazine articles. From addressing the fact that Universities are not academically rigorous enough for women, to being a founding member of a Suffrage Club in Michigan. Bates seems like the type of woman that could potentially make up the minority of the Club, but there is much more to find out.

The past week we were also able to get ahold of some maps that Dr. Cole found at the Maryland Historical Society. These maps were made for insurance pricing purposes and therefore are very detailed and have the numbers of on the street for certain blocks of a neighborhood. Being able to look at a physical map instead of just online and in the time period that we are working with is really cool to try to figure out who is living where.