Scrapbooks and Photo Albums, 1918 - 1952

Ethel Berner Babbitt (1898-1974) grew up in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and attended Emerson College for oratory studies, where she served as a sophomore class officer and worked on the yearbook editing team of the Emersonian before graduating in 1920. After graduation, Berner married Charles Babbitt of Nashua, New Hampshire, an ophthalmologist who owned a business fitting and grinding lenses for eyeglasses. In Nashua, Ethel Babbitt organized an amateur theatre group called the Nashua Players, which performed throughout the mid-1930s and into the 1940s. The Babbitts had two daughters, Ethel Jean and Carol "Cay" Babbitt. They kept a summer farm called Elmcroft, overlooking the Starr King range of the White Mountains from Jefferson, New Hampshire, in exchange for Ethel's care of the home's elderly resident.