Edward Morris Wistar papers

The Edward Morris Wistar papers include general information, correspondence, diaries, reports, financial records, photos, and miscellaneous materials mostly documenting Wistar's mission to administer relief to Armenians in Anatolia in 1896. Armenians were suffering massacres and brutality, sometimes known as the Hamidian massacres. Wistar traveled from Constantinople (now Instanbul) to Ourfa, Diyarbekir, Charsanjak, and Harput.

General information includes Wistar's passport and personal documents from his trip to the Ottoman Empire, notes on politics in the region, and historical information related to the Red Cross and Armenians. Letters from Wistar are primarily to Margaret Wistar (his wife), Clara Barton, Asa Wing, and J. Bevan Braithwaite. The letters describe his work, travel, and give a general sense of his response to his surroundings. Letters to Wistar include those from other Red Cross field workers and missionaries such as H.N. Barnum, C.F. Gates, J.B. Hubbell, Corinna Shattuck, as well as Margaret Wistar. Most of these letters relate to Wistar's work and conditions in the areas where the Red Cross was working, distribution of materials and food to Armenian villagers, and petitions for aid.

Wistar's journal details his frustrations with beaurocracy and government interference, which made it difficult to carry out his work, and his despair at the suffering he was seeing. There is also both the manuscript and printed official report to the Red Cross of the mission Wistar led; financial records indicating expenditures for relief goods, distribution of cash and goods, and lists of recipients; and photographs, mostly of the areas where Wistar did relief work (although some may predate his time there), as well as photographs of the Wistars in Japan.

Miscellaneous materials include papers documenting Wistar's experience with hurricane relief in South Carolina in 1894 and notes on the Japanese Red Cross Society, based on a visit to Japan ca. 1910.