Document case MSS 044 Box 01

Scope and Contents

The Ethel Berner Babbitt Collection consists of materials related to the life of Emerson College alumna Ethel Berner Babbitt, including schoolbooks, photograph albums, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and written personal correspondence.

Scope and Contents

This series consists of a World War I scrapbook of news clippings constructed while Ethel Berner Babbitt was a student at Emerson, as well as a photograph album created for her sorority reunion in 1952.

Scope and Contents

This series contains letters and objects Babbitt saved from her personal correspondence from acquaintances "Helen H." and former Emerson classmate Ethel May Duncan. While the majority of the documents were handwritten letters encased in the original postmarked envelopes, additional non-textual materials sometimes accompanied the letters, and have been divided into their own subseries.

Scope and Contents

The folder contains a handwritten title describing its contents as the 50th reunion of the Emerson College Kappa Gamma Chi sorority on June 6, 1952. The album holds 16 photographs of Babbitt and her college friends, which are glued to the inside of the cover with adhesive. Most photos can be lifted to expose the names of those pictured.

Scope and Contents

This subseries contains the handwritten paper materials of the correspondence Ethel Babbitt Berner received from "Helen H." and Ethel M. Duncan. The subjects of the letters vary, but include school desegregation, teaching in public schools, the correspondents' travels within and outside the United States, as well as their marriages and honeymoons.

Scope and Contents

This subseries includes several dozen photographic negatives which were created in 1935 and 1936 in Nashua, New Hampshire as well as other unknown locations. It also contains dried wildflowers Ethel M. Duncan collected during a trip to Switzerland and a piece of paper indicating where the flowers originated.

Scope and Contents

Contains two letters received by Babbitt in December 1934, in which a friend, Helen H., describes her recent secret marriage and honeymoon.

Scope and Contents The majority of the collection is comprised of letters received by Babbitt during the 1930s through the early 1940s from Ethel May Duncan, a former classmate at Emerson College. During school Babbitt (then Berner) served with Duncan (one year her senior) on the yearbook committee of the Emersonian. While Duncan graduated in 1919 and Babbitt in 1920, the two maintained a relationship as they developed families and careers. At the time of their writing, Duncan was a grammar school teacher in...

Scope and Contents

This folder contains one envelope Babbitt received from Ethel M. Duncan during her stay at the Hotel Montana Lucerne, labeled as "Wild Flowers from Switzerland." Inside, Duncan included two clusters of wildflowers folded between a page of hotel stationary, each side containing a brief description of where the flowers originated and the dates collected: near a glacier in Grindewald, July 19 (year unknown); and Interlaken.