Digital Collections

Over 200 digitized letters written by Abigail Adams (1744-1818) , the wife of John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States.

Election Ballots have been used in political and other types of elections for centuries. Sometimes called a ticket, these ballots listed the names of people who are hoping to be elected. In early American political elections, ballots were specific to a party, listing every person from that party who was running for office. The voter would turn in the party ballot to the voting station. By 1888, many states began instituting secret ballot voting by supplying voters with ballots that listed several parties in columns, allowing the voter to choose a particular party of individual.

Ancestry provides access to census, military, birth, marriage and death records.

The collection of Grant-Burr Family Papers contains over five hundred letters written between 1827 and 1892. Central to the collection is the correspondence between Daniel Grant (1818-1892) and his wife Caroline Burr Grant (1820-1892). The letters of these articulate and well-educated New England families discuss their experiences in westward expansion, early female seminaries, courtship, marriage, childrearing, missionary activity, the California Gold Rush, and the Civil War.

Abigail Kelley Foster (1811-1887), noted antislavery partisan and women’s rights advocate, was an active correspondent and lecturer on behalf of reform movements in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was married to Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881).

The American Antiquarian Society collection of portraits contains 209 silhouettes. Silhouettes are profile portraits made of paper that became popular in the mid-eighteenth century in Europe. Generally the profile of the sitter is cut out of white paper and the resulting shape is then mounted on glossy black paper or black fabric. These portraits became very popular in the United States during the early nineteenth century.