Atkinson Family Papers

Residents of New Brunswick, N.J., including sisters Mary Josephine Atkinson (1854-1933), a teacher and tutor; Sarah Atkinson (1861-1956), a teacher and later a translator (including for the American peace commissioners in Paris in 1898); and Florence Atkinson (1863-1889), a teacher.

Correspondence and diary of Mary Josephine Atkinson, correspondence of Sarah Atkinson, correspondence and diary of Florence Atkinson, other papers of these three individuals and papers of other family members.

The scattered diaries of Mary Atkinson for 1876 to 1925 contain information on her travels to California and Europe, her activities as a teacher (at Riverdale, New York, 1882-1884, and Lexington, Kentucky, 1884-1885) and tutor (in Lenox, Massachusetts, 1885-1892) and her life in New Brunswick.

Among the letters included in Sarah Atkinson's correspondence are several which pertain to the suffrage movement in the U.S., as well as letters from her former classmate Sarita Sanford Ward (d. 1944) which were posted from various places (chiefly in England, France and the U.S.) before, during and after World War I. (Ward was the spouse and then widow of the adventurer, author, sculptor and World War I Red Cross worker Herbert Ward who died in 1919.) Letters which Sarah Atkinson wrote to members of her family while out of the country (including in Argentina in the 1880s and in England and France in 1898) are also present in the collection.

Florence Atkinson's diary, July 24, 1883-May 8, 1886, and related letters which she sent to family members concern her trips to and from Argentina, her stay there and a visit to Chile in early 1885. She had been recruited by the Argentine government (along with her sister Sarah Atkinson and other women teachers) to serve as an instructor in a women's normal school and taught for two years at the Escuela Normal de San Juan.