The Winslows of Boston
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Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I FAMILY MEMORIAL The Winslows of Boston Isaac Winslow Margaret Catherine Winslow IN FIVE VOLUMES VOLUME I Boston, Massachusetts 1837?-1873? TRANSCRIBED AND EDITED BY ROBERT NEWSOM UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE 2009-10 Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I Editorial material Copyright © 2010 Robert Walker Newsom ___________________________________ All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this work, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I A NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT AND TRANSCRIPTION THIS MANUSCRIPT WAS BEGUN BY ISAAC WINSLOW of Boston (1774-1856) in 1837 or 1838 and continued by his daughter, Margaret Catherine* Winslow (1816-90), after her father’s death. It came down to me from my mother, Julia Valentine Winslow Newsom (1905-78), who had it from her father, Willard Winslow (1865-1934), who I presume had it from his father, William Henry Winslow (1834-1909), whose birth is recorded below (V, 165) and who was Isaac’s grandson (via Benjamin Pollard Winslow [1810-79]). Margaret appears to have worked at her portion until about 1873. Isaac’s portion consists of unbound pages, but is presented as being in volumes and chapters. All but the final 44 pp. of the third volume are by Isaac. They number more than 620 pages, mostly measuring 6 x 8 in. (though many pages have been lengthened by the addition of pasted-on pieces of paper, including the backs of some envelopes). Rarely, Isaac has pasted an extract from a magazine or other publication on the reverse of his pages. The final two vols., by Margaret, are bound in cloth and leather, and the last of these is labeled “Album.” It is evident that the pages of at least her first volume have been trimmed and some additional pages tipped in. Most probably the trimming occurred when an original binding was redone. Margaret does refer to her portion as constituting volumes, and she lapses in and out of the practice of referring to sections within her portion as constituting chapters. But she does not number her chapters. Her pages are unnumbered, but I have added page numbers to the original manuscript and have designated her volumes as volumes four and five of the work considered as a whole. Pages in her volumes measure 7 ½ x 9 ½ in. and total 371 pages. A few loose leaves have been inserted into the bound volumes, including newspaper clippings, poems by Margaret and two business letters by Isaac Winslow as copied by two of his sons. The total word count is more than 300,000 words, roughly equally divided between father and daughter (who gets in far more words per page than her father, owing to her smaller hand and larger pages). There is a complicated twist in the composition history inasmuch as Margaret had begun her own journal a few years before her father’s death. This was interrupted by four years of invalidism and very quickly by her father’s death.† As a result, the opening five pages of her portion overlap and repeat material in Isaac’s portion, and they might legitimately be considered incidental and not integral with the Memorial as a whole. But they have their own interest, and the last of these opening pages is an interesting account of her father’s funeral. I * In the U. S. Census of 1880 and the one published poem of hers I have been able to locate, the spelling of Catherine is thus. But Margaret herself spells it as well as all other instances of the name with an “a.” † More on this in a note at III, 72, which is the last page of Isaac’s portion and the beginning of Margaret’s continuation of it. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I have transcribed these and also inserted in a footnote the one published obituary of Isaac that I have thus far found. Isaac writes in quill, and his hand is generally very well-formed and fine, but his punctuation looks to a modern reader very idiosyncratic and careless. He is happy to place commas between subjects and their verbs. He uses apostrophes very rarely. His periods are usually dashes, his commas are more like periods, and he is fond of combinations of periods and dashes. If the end of a sentence coincides with end of a line, he often omits any punctuation whatsoever. He often places a quite light dot after words, and it is impossible to know if these were intended as punctuation marks, though it does appear to me in many or even most cases that they are intended as commas. He breaks words at the ends of lines often without employing hyphens and unmindful of syllabification. He sometimes fails to lift his quill between words and sometimes lifts it in the middle of words. His spelling is inconsistent and sometimes archaic. He is frequently inconsistent in or indifferent to capitalization. He writes the letter “s” in a medial position generally in the eighteenth-century fashion (as a long double loop), while he for the most part writes the modern form of the letter when it begins a word (and often of such a size as to suggest a capital). He often drops the ‘e’ in words ending “-ed” or replaces that vowel with a hint of an apostrophe. He is fond of double “l”s in words like “vessel” and “powerful.” And sometimes he appears weary, and his hand falters and he makes mistakes. (He began the work at age 65 and continued it for several years (at the very least seven), if not right up until his death at 82.) There is too the fact that he owned a rum distillery. So deciphering his words is sometimes difficult, especially when he uses words or spellings that never found their way into the OED or Webster’s (like “pettianger” or “Navarino bonnet”*). Margaret writes I believe chiefly with a steel nib, though sometimes a quill (with which she is less skilled than her father). Her usual hand can be quite tiny, but is generally highly legible except in a few places where the ink she has used has faded almost to invisibility. She writes occasionally in larger and more flowing hands, sometimes with the evident purpose of approximating the hand of a letter, poem, or other writing she is quoting. As we would expect of someone of her generation, she is rather more regular and modern in her punctuation and spelling than her father (although her periods and commas are like his difficult to distinguish, and she often uses dashes for periods and semi-colons where we would use commas). But, like the dutiful daughter she was, she shares or has inherited some of his peculiarities of style and usage, as well, indeed, as his manner of thinking. She evidently read his portion very thoroughly and thoughtfully and as a model to be emulated. The condition of Isaac’s pages ranges from excellent to poor because he uses paper of varying quality and also owing to his pages having been handled and stored unbound. There is some chipping especially in pages towards the beginning and ends of the two sections in which the ms. was for a long time stored. But almost no pages are in danger of cracking and only in a small handful of places have words close to the edges of pages been lost to chipping. * See below, I, 215 and V, 76. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I Margaret’s pages are in excellent condition, and her bindings are tight, corners are rubbed and one is badly bumped; one leather spine is detached, though the binding itself remains very good. For the purposes of this transcription, which is intended to give as accurate a record of the text as written as I am capable of, I have retained all the idiosyncrasies and errors the writers have made, including repeated words (except, by and large, in the case of “catchwords,” intentionally repeated words at the bottom of pages in anticipation of the page following—a common practice in books of the eighteenth century). Undoubtedly I have introduced errors of my own, and in many places my readings have been made possible only by the context of a given sentence. For example, I dare say the following sample– –would be illegible to many readers besides myself without the context of the surrounding sentence. (The word is “result,” or at least so I take it to be.) Or this – – a good example of Isaac’s lifting his quill in the middle of a word, which turns out to be “interest.” Or this – – a good example of Isaac’s not lifting his quill between words. The context easily prompts “from us by.”* Or consider this example: My first reading gave “esteemed,” which is indeed a popular word with Isaac—as, for example, in this example: * These examples are from I, 182, II, 189 and I, 183 respectively. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Winslow Family Memorial, Volume I But here is the context with the doubtful word represented by an asterisk: “... at the same time owing to the uncertain position in which he stood, as a * loyalist, merely a resident at the will of the State Government.