Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Taking names

As Sydney’s posts have documented, one of the challenges we’ve faced is the difficulty of finding even super-basic information– like, names–of the members of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.

Today, I happened to stumble upon a treasure trove of a document that had passed under the radar of our summer researchers. I was checking and verifying the names and addresses of the membership, which Sydney has painstakingly transcribed over about half of the summer. Names, we have all discovered, are very difficult to transcribe.

In the middle of a large, mostly empty, unlabeled book in the “Memberships” box of the WLCB, I ran across a few pages where the WLCB Constitution had been painstakingly copied, followed by an undated pledge signed by the membership.

Pledge
Pledge signed by officers, Board of Management, and members, probably 1898. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.

We’ve been trying to find some of these names for some time. Mrs. George K. McGaw (Margaret!). Mrs. R. K. Cautley (Lucy!). If we had realized how momentous this document was when we’d run our eyes across it earlier in the summer, we’d have saved ourselves a lot of work– many of the most active members of the Club, unsurprisingly, appear on this list.

Page 2 of signatures. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.

I was able to date this document tentatively to the 1898-1899 season. Part of my logic was that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall (Letitia!) took over the presidency of the Club from Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (Francese!). I also referred to the lists of officers and Board of Management that Sydney & Clara have compiled this summer– and while the signatories here most closely resemble those listed in the programs for 1898-1899, they don’t match exactly.

So, an answer raises more questions: how stable was the Board of Management in the Club? Did people switch in and out after being elected? But for now, I am very happy that we now have first names for about 15% of the Club.

It is one of the few “public” documents of the Club in which the women made a concerted effort to use their first names. Now that I’ve become more familiar with the documents, I’m seeing first names scattered about here and there, including in the title page of the membership dues book from 1890 (which lists Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin as treasurer). They also sign their first names when elections are being held (They are the ones voting, after all, not their husbands!) Their first names also appear in the minutes, perhaps because those are more “private” documents.

On this pledge, there are only 2 or 3 instances where a signee has used her “married” name (Mrs. Thomas Hill), or used initials rather than writing out their full names. I find these hesitations both sad and touching.

If only they had written their names. With their names, we can start fleshing out their histories.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Names and Dates: Connecting the dots

Diving into discovering who the women of the Club are has come with some rewards, and many challenges. For the past few weeks now I have been in charge of figuring out who was in the Club when and where they lived. Thanks to the incredible record-keeping in the early years that is not a difficult task. Much of the same information overlaps in different notebooks. Essentially, from 1980 to 1916 we have an almost complete record of who the members in the Club and also who the board of management was. However, these are just names and nothing more. My next task was to try to figure who these women were or at least try to find some of their real names—not their husbands names.

Instead of trying to find information about over a hundred women, we thought it would be best to start small, and higher up, with the board of management. This board includes an average of twelve women. One president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and six members of the board. These are the women that help run and decide the direction of the club. Having the lists of the board from year to year all in one place can also help explain changes in the dynamic of the club. For example, Hunter has been transcribing the minutes for Fall of 1903 where Lydia Crane was recording the minutes. In the middle of a meeting the hand-writing changes indicating that Miss Crane is not writing anymore. Looking at the board of management for 1903-1904 we can see that Miss Crane is not actually the recording secretary, but she was for 1901-1902 and then comes back in 1906-1907. These are the tiny shifts that we are beginning to pick up the longer we read what these ladies were doing. We are able to piece together to try to get a more three dimensional image of the Club.

So the board of management seemed like a good place to start, since these are the women that the club revolves around, and we picked the year 1903-1904. Here is where the difficulty lies, as I have mentioned in my previous posts: many of the women are referred to by their husbands names, which makes it hard to find out their real names. However, I have been able to use different resources such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com to be able to locate the names of the men, and then many times they have the names of the women as well.

When doing these searches it is hard to determine if the information that I have found is really for the same person that I am searching for. Without knowing the birth and death information about a person before I search for them, a slew of people can come into the found list and I am unsure of if it is who I am looking for. Another thing that I am finding more relevant and difficult in my search is the cemeteries where these people are buried. Many of the ones that I have been able to find are in either Green Mount Cemetery or in Loudon Park Cemetery, with private church cemeteries thrown in throughout. Green Mount is the place where many people of prestige were buried. While I have not found out much information about Loudon Park Cemetery, there is a large portion of the cemetery which was dedicated to the burial of Union soldiers which might have had an impact on who wanted to be buried there depending on their sympathies during the war. Another piece of information is where the two cemeteries are located. Green Mount being located in Greenmount Ave, a couple of blocks south of North Ave. This is located close to where most of the members of the Club lived, therefore making it convenient for them to go to Green Mount. Loudon Park on the other hand, is a 30 minute drive from Green Mount when I put the directions into Google. On horse that would take much longer, let along a slow moving burial procession would be about two days.

The top middle of the map is a small green square which is Green Mount, Loudon Park is not pictured on the map but would be south west of the bottom left edge of the map.

Aside from the interesting information about the cemeteries I have been somewhat successful with finding information about the women. Out of the twelve members of the board of management for 1903-1904, I was able to find birth and death years for six of the members and was able to determine the names of two of the women that had gone by their husbands names. In 1903 Mrs. Jordan Stabler, or Jennie Stabler (although I am not positive that this is her) was 35; Mrs. Philip Uhler, or Julia Pearl Uhler, was 44; Miss Lydia Crane was 70; Miss Ellen Duvall was 62; Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese was 47; and Miss Eveline Early was 35.  I was really disappointed that I could not find anything on Mrs. John Wrenshall, who is the president for many years of the Club. Thanks to findagrave.com I was able to find a picture of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese.

This image was uploaded to findagrave.com. Unfortunately we have no ability to double-check if it is really her, but hopefully it is.

It is a sad realization that many of the women in the Club are only recognized by a name that is not really theirs. Thankfully there are tools out there that help make it possible to learn about Julia Pearl Uhler instead of just Philip Uhler.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

A reader writes

Dr. Mangiavellano just wrote to me & asked me to send you this:
I’ve enjoyed reading your posts on the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore and following along with your questions and discoveries. I ran into Dr. Cole yesterday on campus before your walking tour and we fell into conversation about the pleasures (and frustrations) you’ve experienced in your research and transcriptions. We talked a little about the difficult of finding birth and death dates of club members–and how some of you have turned to obituaries of their husbands for information about the wives. Dr. Cole explained to me the frustrating reality that obituaries of prominent Baltimore husbands may mention wives in passing without any substantive reflection or information on them. Tremendously frustrating.
Might it be worthwhile to visit Greenspring cemetery (or wherever they’re buried) and seek out the graves themselves, I wonder? I’m sure you could contact the sexton, get a map of the grounds, and do some sleuthing. I doubt there would be GPS locations for them, but you never know. It would be an entirely different kind of research I’m sure most of you have done and I’d love to hear about it if you pursued it. Not only would and afternoon of traipsing around a cemetery help you find the birth and death dates you’re looking for, you can write up a great post about it. Win-win!
So yes, it looks like another field trip is in order– Hunter, maybe you could organize this one. The Green Mount Cemetery website has a lot of great info, and there are various maps available online. Plus, a bunch of the graves are indexed in the appropriately named FindaGrave.com (e.g., Miss Lydia Crane).
Posted on by Clara Love

Publication

I ran into Dr. Cole on campus this week, and we had a brief chat regarding my upcoming assignment, which is to track how Lizette Woodworth Reese’s poetic career grew and was shaped over the course of her experience with the Club. One thing we touched upon was how determined many members of the Club were to get their works published, or at least to share their own original works with their peers. In thinking about the work I’ve done so far with the Club programs, I’m pleasantly surprised at how frequently these women brought their own literary and artistic talents to the table right alongside readings and discussions of established works of (men’s) literature. Whether they read or presented their own works or had a fellow club member do so for them, I have come across hundreds of instances of original writing and art being given a platform at club meetings.

Reading Sydney’s post about searching for information about Club members when we often have only a husband’s name to work with made me similarly frustrated. Especially in the context of producing original content, it’s a little disheartening to reflect on how little I know or would be able to know about a married woman who wrote something still under her husband’s name. This issue is further complicated in my corner by the fact that very often, the actual titles of the women’s original work is not listed on programs. Instead, title of the reading or presentation was often just something like “A Story,” “Two Poems,” or “A Sketch,” with no further clues as to what it might be about. Sometimes however, this was not so, and I am fortunate to have some actual titles on record. In fact, some readings of original works have titles that include the title of an actual upcoming published volume, particularly Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese, who alongside Miss Virginia Woodward Cloud and a few others, I have noticed reading most frequently.

I’m still curious as to how much of a collaborative process these public readings of original work were, particularly the ones that come from or led to publication. Are the works just labeled “Story,” or “Poem,” works in progress? Did these women provide feedback for each other like a writing workshop, or were they simply enjoying one another’s pieces? I hope to find out more this week as I delve into this topic through the lens of Lizette.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Looking Further into who these Women Were

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.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson · 1 Comment

Who is in the Club?

This past week I was put in charge of looking into who the members were and where they lived and also when they paid their dues to the Club. The notebook that we found was in box seven and contained a lot of different notebooks of various shapes and sizes. The one that I began to look at was kept by the treasurer and documented in alphabetical order where the members lived and the date that they paid their dues.

I found this task interesting but also somewhat mundane. After a day or so of doing this I started to rummage through box seven looking at the other notebooks that I had mostly skipped over. In the box I found a notebook that was simply the names and address of the different members in various “seasons” dating from 1898-1899 to 1915-1916. Although  there are some years missing, it is interesting to see the development of the members of the Club and to see some of the key members in the founding of the Club begin to resign.

The addresses are enough to make this type of transcribing engaging, I found myself keeping a mental track record of the ladies and where they lived. Many of them lived in the same areas, which makes sense. But talking to Hunter (a local Marylander) it is surprising to learn that many of these areas have gone through great transformation from the elite upperclass women that resided there during the turn of the century and early 1900s to the families that live there today.

An interesting aspect of this new notebook that was found is that it gives the Board of Management for each year. In this case throughout the years I can see certain members moving up from being just directors to secretaries and then some become vice presidents. All the while Mrs. Wrenshall remains the president for many years.

Another notebook that was found documents just the year of 1912-1913, even though this year is documented in the other notebook with many of the other years. I am curious to try and find out through reading the minutes of the meetings why there was the same information kept in two separate notebooks.

Something interesting about this notebook is that for certain years there is a list of the members signatures for when there was an election. I assume that this was just a roll for who was there and who was voting but it is interesting to see each members’ unique signature. It almost helps to make them seem like real people—not just names on a page.