The Archival Field Fellowship is a grant offered by the Roving Archivist Program. The Fellowships increase hands-on assistance to Massachusetts repositories and provide emerging archivists with professional experience and mentorship. In 2022-2023, six institutions representing a diverse cross-section of archival repositories are hosting field fellows. As the fellowships are completed, field fellows share reflections and insights about their site experience on the MA SHRAB blog. This program is funded through support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Author: Kerry Lydon
I was assigned to the Golden Ball Tavern Museum in Weston, MA for my Archival Field Fellowship. The Golden Ball Tavern Museum is a historic house museum in Weston, MA. It was built as a tavern and family home by Isaac Jones (1728-1813) in 1768, who was granted an innholder’s license in 1770. Isaac Jones’s grandfather, Josiah, was one of the founders of Weston and its first deacon, making the Jones family long-established in the town by Isaac’s time. Jones was considered one of the wealthiest and most respected men in the town of Weston, though Jones is perhaps most notable for his original Tory sympathies during the start of the Revolutionary War, and his later conversion to the Patriot cause. The inn remained in operation until 1793, when it became a private home. The house was occupied by direct descendants until the death of Isaac’s great-great-grandson Ralph Frost Jones in 1963. In 1964, Weston residents Howard and Mary Gambrill organized the purchase of the estate (including the documents that would become the Jones Family papers) on behalf of other interested citizens to preserve the Tavern and its artifacts and turn it into a historic house museum. I hadn’t heard of the museum before this, though I had heard of Isaac Jones when doing research on slavery in Massachusetts.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the collection or the institution and was prepared to have a good deal of basic archival work to put into place based on the GBTM’s project description. Their proposal suggested arranging, describing, and re-housing one series of their Jones Family papers Collection and then leaving detailed instructions for their volunteers to do similar work for the other series. The parameters of the project gave me the impression that I’d be coming into a large series with perhaps unsorted material if it was expected to take the entire fellowship to complete.
I was surprised, then, when I arrived for my first day on site in mid-November and received a finding aid that, while not DACS-compliant, was at item-level and meticulously sorted into six series, one for each generation of Jones family members who had lived in the house-turned-museum (excluding a seventh series of the family’s newspapers and magazines which were in document boxes already). The series that the museum had chosen for me to focus on was only a few inches thick and it became apparent that any work on this series would finish up long before the end of the fellowship. The staff explained that they had envisioned a larger project to rehouse and process all six series, which were currently stored in a fireproof safe in bundles of folders. In a typical collection, either unprocessed or with a less consistent arrangement, doing all six series would have been impossible within the time limits, so they were advised to try and scale down the project. The Jones Family papers, however, had essentially been processed by their volunteer archivist committee over the course of fifty years, during which they consulted experts on best practices for storage and even acid treatment. The current “genealogically arranged” finding aid dates from at least the early 2000s, and updates in yearly reports indicate that the museum staff did a lot of research on the materials before its compilation. While unusual, I found that the genealogical arrangement was well-suited to the types of materials in the Jones Family papers.
Before re-processing the Jones Family papers, several of the series were unboxed yet foldered on shelves.
The result is a high level of intellectual control of their collection and an established, consistent arrangement schema. Any changes to one series could make it drastically different from the others, and if the instructions left for the volunteers involved archival theory it might become difficult to remain consistent. The scale of the initial proposal to just work on one series was too small, and the collection would not be best served by doing a large-scale re-arrangement to a more “traditional” arrangement schema, like time period or material type. But changes needed to be made, particularly in Series I. That Series had a planned subseries that had been noted but not implemented properly, followed by a handful of materials at its end that seemed to be more suited to another generation, or had no clear relationship to Jones family members or in-laws. At the same time, while the collection was well-researched, the work of the archives committee (such as arrangement, preservation, and exhibition) had not been compiled. As I pondered on how to adjust the scope of the arrangement and description, I decided to spend my second day on site looking into the archive committee files and get a history of what had been done to or for the collection from the 1970s to the present day, as I knew I wanted to include that information in my final finding aid. It also helped me understand why certain decisions were made for arrangement, so that when I ran across some non-traditional choices, I had context for what the thought process was rather than immediately wanting to make changes.
The third day found me going through the museum’s filing cabinets, which turned out to be helpful as I found several family photographs which were not in the finding aid. I let the staff know, and while I chose not to integrate these into the collection during my project (I wasn’t sure if they would be a separate series, a separate collection, or sorted into the subseries), they are now in the museum’s research room and not out of sight in a filing cabinet.
Before re-processing, a deep dive into curatorial files and legacy collection management information.
Overall, while papers of the six generations needed to be rehoused, I found them in good condition. Most documents had their own folder, so that folder-level was equivalent to item-level. The items were not further divided into a sub-subseries, but there was a rough ordering of the type of document in the larger subseries. Each item received a designation based on its series, subseries, and order in the subseries (i.e., I-A-3 is Series I, Subseries A, item 3), which meant that moving the items around would mean adjusting this designation.
In the end, I decided that my priority would be refining and rehousing the six subseries as time allowed, but with priority given to Series I. Rather than redoing the arrangement and description, I would use the existing structure and only make changes if the item clearly did not belong in its subseries. Description would be refined if needed to be more useful for researchers. Any rearrangement would be explicitly listed in a separate document for the museum staff so items with altered designations would still be identifiable with their old designation. (Some items had accession numbers as well, but the majority do not.) Before making changes, I would make a document of a series, compare the listing of items to the actual physical folders, makes notes regarding possible changes, and then decide if those changes (and any changes resulting from altering the order) were worthwhile. When I finalized the changes I wanted to make (if any), I implemented them as I went through the collection and rehoused each document, first in an archival folder, and then in a box. We had a brief interlude where it turned out that we had only ordered enough folders for one series (from the initial proposal), but that turned into a good exercise in researching supplies that determining what was strictly necessary to finish the project, not to restock an archive.
Ultimately, I was able to get through all six series thanks in part to additional funding found by SHRAB, which meant that I was able to rehouse all six original series and a series I created, Series VIII: Miscellaneous. This last series is designated for materials in the collection that had no clear tie to a Jones family member but were part of the original estate purchased in 1964 (where most papers in the collection come from) or donated by a Jones descendant. I was also able to add items that had been intended for the collection but were not added and were not on the finding aid.
The finding aid was worked on simultaneously, with an eye towards making sure that with its item-level descriptions inherited from the previous version, it remained navigable and easy to edit. I avoided making any complicated formatting choices so that should staff need to adjust descriptions or add a section in the future, they can do so without the formatting making things difficult. While the finding aid clocks in at 40+ pages, I am very confident that the collection is now navigable by any user regardless of familiarity with the Jones family (which the staff mentioned as a particular difficulty), is as accurate as possible in describing the collection and the items, and all stored in archival folders and document boxes. I also learned to make custom enclosures for books to use on the collection’s ledgers and diaries, which will be a valuable skill.
The Jones Family papers after re-processing and re-housing.
I strongly believe that I was successful in the project because of the GBTM’s strong intellectual control of their materials and the hard work of their archive volunteers since the 1970s. I came in to carefully mended and tended to 18th-century documents, and essentially an item-level description for most of the collection. I was able to adjust to their unique arrangement because everything else was so well documented. It was interesting working with a series that had a strong existing arrangement structure, which was also not a usual arrangement choice (by generation of the family, then subdivided by individual). It was a great exercise in improving upon an existing arrangement without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It made me less precious about “proper” arrangement, and to focus on what the organization needed to make the collection easier to navigate. I know this more flexible approach will be useful in my career going forward—after all, not all collections I’ll work with will be completely unprocessed.
This cash book was given to the museum in 2018 after it turned up in the Weston Historical Society collections. The note inside explains how it ended up outside the family.
I want to thank Deb Carroll, Sylvia Diaz, Katie Campbell, and former director Joan Bines for being so available for me to ask questions, and to my SHRAB mentor Sarah-Jane Poindexter for encouraging and advising me throughout this whole process. All in all, this SHRAB fellowship has exposed me to great mentors in the field, the lovely staff of the Golden Ball Tavern Museum, and what it means to be an archivist and not just an archives graduate student.