LibGuides: Primary Sources: A Guide: Personal & Family Papers

Working with Personal & Family papers

Personal or family papers are the collected letters, diaries, legal or financial documents, photographs, and other materials that an individual our household may have saved over the years and eventually found their way into an archives. The papers of famous people may even be published in books or online. These are rich sources for historians, but also require close attention when reading and interpreting since these papers may include many different types of documents.

Some materials were only intended to be read by one or two people, as in a diary or a private letter. Others are official, public documents, like the deed to property or a marriage license. Ask yourself some of the following questions when analyzing personal papers:

Was there an intended audience? What relationship did that audience have to the writer?
Is the writer being more honest in private writing than she would be in public?
What does the writer think important enough to mention or describe in the documents?

Photographs and other images require special consideration. Who is in the frame? Who took the picture? Is it a candid shot of daily life or a composed portrait?

Personal and family papers may also include ephemera, items meant to be used for only a short time--football tickets, theater performance program, greeting cards, or name tags. These can be valuable glimpses into daily life, social events, and what the collector valued as sentimental or worth keeping for posterity.

Examples of Personal Papers

When personal papers are published in book form, they often include one of the following terms in the library catalog. Search for a personal name combined with one of these to search for these types of documents:

Personal narratives
Diaries
Correspondence

Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827
Consists mainly of Jefferson's correspondence, but also includes his drafts of the Declaration of Independence, drafts of Virginia laws; his fragmentary autobiography; the small memorandum books he used to record his spending; the pages on which for many years he daily recorded the weather; many charts, lists, tables, and drawings recording his scientific and other observations; notes; maps; recipes; ciphers; locks of hair; wool samples; and more.
Louis J. Twomey, S.J. Papers
This collection documents the post-World War II social reform work of the founding director of Loyola's Institute of Human Relations, Louis J. Twomey, through correspondence, administrative files, photographic materials and audio recordings.

Plantation Records

The records of southern plantations often present the historian with a mix of personal and business documents as the letters of family members intersect with the operations of the plantation.

Lewis Stirling and Family Papers, 1791-1938
This digital collection consists of an assortment of correspondence, legal records, and plantation diaries and record books of multiple generations of the family of Lewis Stirling, a Louisiana sugarcane and cotton planter. Original manuscripts are at the LSU Libraries Special Collections.

Travel Writing

A special type of personal writing is the travel narrative. Often intended for publication, travelers documented their successes and tribulations while abroad, often describing what they perceived as strange and exotic cultures and environments. Because travel narratives reflect the biases and perspectives of the writer--and should not be considered objective or neutral accounts--historians can use these sources to explore the perceptions and prejudices of the writer and intended audience in addition to gleaning some details of daily life and culture that the writer thought worthy of note.

Description and travel
To find published travel narratives, combine the phrase "description and travel" with any geographic location, usually a country name, when searching the library catalog.

The following databases may include travel journals and digital copies of published travel narratives.

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750 to 1920
This collection, digitized by the Library of Congress, comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920.
Latin American Travelogues
An ongoing project at Brown University to create a digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries.
Travelers in the Middle East Archive
A project at Rice University, this collection includes texts, maps, and images documenting travel to the Middle East (primarily Egypt) between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These materials range from travel guides, travel narratives, and museum catalogs to stereocards, advertisements and postcards.
Voyages en Afrique
A collection of French-language travel writing about all parts of the African continent, including examples from early European exploration, colonization, and tourism. Digitized by the Bibliothèque National de France (BNF)
Women's Travel Diaries
A project at Duke University, this collection includes diaries written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.