Series 1: Personal Papers

Series I: Personal Papers is composed of four sub-series.

Sub-series I: Bound Volumes. Virtually all of the bound manuscript materials retained by M. Carey Thomas have been gathered together in the first subseries. (The exceptions are account books pertaining to Mary Whitall Thomas’s estate). These volumes, which include such types of materials as journals, diaries, notebooks, account books, memorandum books, address books, etc., have been arranged chronologically, based upon the date of the earliest entry, with undated items at the end.

Sub-series II: Correspondence. Correspondnce has been filed alphabetically by author, or in the case of Thomas’s outgoing correspondence, by addressee. Letters of each author or recipient have been filed chronologically. Missing dates were supplied whenever possible on the basis of content. In the absence of other information, dates of dockets and postmarks appearing on accompanying envelopes have been used. Undated items are filed last, and unidentifiable fragments were placed at the end of each group of letters.

Sub-series III: Third Party Correspondence. This sub-series is organized alphabetically by correspondent. Most of the family correspondence, i.e. letters to and from Thomas’s ancestors and relatives, excluding letters to and from Thomas herself, apparently came into her possession from the estates of her parents. Some may have been collected by Thomas or made available to her when she was gathering material for her autobiography. A few letters addressed to Mamie Gwinn and Mary Garrett probably were acquired by Thomas at the time of the marriage of the former and the death of the latter.

In many cases, particularly in the correspondence of Mary Whitall Thomas’s immediate family, letters bear messages from more than one person. For example, there are numerous joint letters from John and Mary Whitall to their children.

The final group of correspondence in this series consists of letters that were not written by or addressed to either Carey Thomas or any member of her family. By far the largest run of these letters was written to or by Mary Garrett. As a single exception to the subdivision of the Third Party Correspondence, Mary Garrett’s letters addressed to Carey Thomas’s relatives are interfiled with her outgoing correspondence.

Sub-Series IV: Autobiographical Materials. From the time of her retirement in 1922 until her death in 1935, Carey Thomas ostensibly was engaged in work on her autobiography. Although no actual draft, or even any very sizable fragments of a draft, survives, the project attracted the attention of a number of publishers (see their letters among the Incoming Personal Correspondence) and employed scores of hours of Thomas's time. The product is thousands of pages of documents collected by Thomas to serve as resource materials, rough sketches of early chapters, and a plethora of notes, many of which consist of a cryptic word or phrase scribbled on a half sheet of paper.