RLP 347: Effie Kelsey and BitterSweet-A Poem, Researching Material Culture

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 347, Effie Kelsey and BitterSweet– A Poem. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you doing?

Nicole (50s):
Doing well. How about you? What have you been doing?

Diana (53s):
Well, we are on the countdown to RootsTech, so I am thinking ahead to making sure all my presentations are ready to go. We’re working on some booth things and I know you’ve been working hard on the booth. What have you been doing?

Nicole (1m 8s):
Right? I’ve just been trying to finish up all of the to-do items that RootsTech gives us for having an in-person and a virtual booth and just reviewing that the virtual booth looks right and making sure that we have our banners ready. We decided to order a new banner that has our newer picture because our first banner we made in 2018. So it’s been a while and the picture isn’t that much newer, but a little bit newer and just updating things a bit. So it’ll be fun to go to RootsTech and see everyone. Hopefully the banner gets here in time so we can use it.

Diana (1m 43s):
Well, I’m sure it’ll be fine. It always is, and we are excited to have RootsTech coming up, and for all of those who can’t come in person, we hope you’ll visit us at our online booth. All right, well, let’s do some announcements. We are looking forward to our next Research Like a Pro webinar series. This will be on Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The presenter is Heidi Mathis, one of our wonderful Family Locket researchers, and the title is Irish 4th-Great-Grandparents – Dealing with Sparse Records and Mild Endogamy. This case study examines methodologies for identifying the parents of Irish immigrants Patrick Dinan and Bridget Riordan, who settled in Ohio.

Diana (2m 37s):
Through analysis of surviving Irish Catholic parish records and DNA matches with documented ancestral links to specific Limerick townlands, multiple potential siblings emerged. These genetic and documentary connections strengthen hypothesized parental identifications despite the characteristic challenges of pre-Famine Irish genealogical research. Well, this was such a fun project and I’m excited to have Heidi talk about it. We have a lot of people that really struggle with Irish research. You have Irish immigrants, and how can you really prove that the ones in Ireland that you think might be yours are yours? Well, DNA can give us that. It’s so great. So Heidi, will be talking all about several things that she used in researching and using the documents as well as DNA.

Diana (3m 18s):
So we hope you’ll join us for that. And if you haven’t yet registered, you can register on our website and then you’ll have access to all the recordings and all the be able to join us live on all of the webinars going forward. Well, our next Research Like a Pro study group starts in August, 2025. We hope you’ll consider joining us to tackle one of your tough challenges, and if you are interested in being a peer group leader for that, the application is on our website. We hope you’ll join our newsletter so you can get notification of when we have coupons or sales, as well as all of our latest blog posts and podcasts and YouTube videos.

Diana (3m 60s):
Well, as we’ve mentioned, we’re excited about RootsTech, which is coming up on March 6th through 8th, and it’ll be available virtually. So we hope you’ll join us virtually, if not in person. Then I’m excited to be going out to Montgomery, Alabama, in Alabama in April. April 5th, I’ll be doing the Research Like a Pro seminar for the Alabama Genealogists Society, and I’ll be in person. So I’m looking forward to that. And then Nicole and I’ll both be in Louisville, Kentucky for the National Genealogists Society Conference, and that’s May 23rd to May 26th. So lots of fun things coming up this spring.

Nicole (4m 37s):
Well, our listener Spotlight today is from Raymond, and the title is Research Like a Pro. He says, “I’ve been working on my genealogy for a few years now. I was told of your book by a friend and I’m purchasing it. I have just started listening to your podcast, and it has already hit some chords with me, especially about recording my research.” Well, thanks for writing that, Raymond, and we hope that recording your research will be a valuable avenue for you.

Diana (5m 5s):
Right. We’re so grateful to everyone who recommends our books and our podcasts to friends, because that’s how the word spreads. Well, today we are going to have some fun talking about Researching Material Culture. So all that means is the stuff that we have inherited, and we may wonder what in the world we should do with this stuff. So maybe you’ve got Grandma’s China or Grandpa’s stopwatch, and you know a little bit about their youth and importance in the family. You know, you always ate off of Grandma’s China. That’s an easy one. But sometimes there are other items that might challenge us and we can research them to really understand more about our ancestors.

Diana (5m 51s):
I took Gina Filbert Ortega’s Institute course, Material Culture, in January, and it was so inspirational and so fun, and I now have a whole new outlook on using these physical objects I’ve inherited to understand more about my ancestors and their past. So during the class, Gina asked us to, you know, really pick an item and do some research with the things that we were learning, and then at the end, we were going to share what we learned. So I looked around my room, I have a lot of artifacts here in my office, and picked out this little book that had been my great Aunt Effie’s.

Diana (6m 33s):
I inherited it from my mother because after she passed away, we were cleaning out her home, and I found this little volume, it was called titled, Bittersweet, A Poem by JG Holland. And I kind of like books. I have a lot of bookshelves, a lot of books, and I especially like really neat little, little books. So I brought this home, I put it on my shelf with some of my other little books I’ve collected, but then I didn’t do anything further with it until this class. And so I thought this would be the perfect thing to try to figure out more about Aunt Effie using this historical research process Gina taught us. So I learned so much about this book and more about my Aunt Effie in the process.

Nicole (7m 19s):
What a fun idea to research a physical object. Well, in the process of studying about material culture, you learned the historical research process, and it’s great how it’s very similar to the genealogical research process. So you used each step to research Bittersweet, and then how cool that you got to present your findings to the class at the end of the week in a PowerPoint presentation.

Diana (7m 48s):
It was fun to be able to share because, you know, when we do our research, we’re always excited to share what we learned. So I wrote a blog post about this and put in pictures of some of my slides because it was so fun creating them. I wanted to do something with them.

Nicole (8m 2s):
Yeah, that is really fun to be able to share. Well, the first step is to identify an idea, topic or research question, and it needs to be a real question and an achievable question. And it could entail discovering the history of an item or providing historical context, dating a photo or object, or verifying family lore. The first step is to thoroughly examine the object and ask questions. Looking at the book, Diana wrote down these notes, item of interest, leather bound, book cover, hand tooled, and painted. Effie is written on the front page, a dollar and 50 cents has been erased, the title page has no publication date, but does include the publisher title and author.

Nicole (8m 51s):
Opposite the title page is an image of a castle, and it says, Bittersweet, A Poem by JG Holland, author of the Bay Path, Titcomb’s Letters, et cetera, New York, Kirsten Company, publishers.

Diana (9m 6s):
Well, I knew that Aunt Effie had remained single her entire life. I knew her in her very later years. My mom and I went to stay with her for a few days once she lived in Springfield at the end of her life, Springfield, Utah. And the family story was that she had lived for a time in New York City. She was a teacher and a librarian, and I hypothesized that Bittersweet must have been special to her somehow. I also had this really neat trunk that she had hand painted and embellished with flowers and leaves, and I wondered if she had maybe painted the design on the front of the book, and she had had it rebound.

Diana (9m 47s):
So I had some ideas about this little book, but really, you know, of course they were all hypotheses. But I looked through the book really carefully and came up with a list of questions, which is what we were taught to do. You know, brainstorm all the possibilities for research, and it was so fun to do this. So here were some of the questions and brainstorming possibilities for research. I came up with, when was it published? So I thought I could look at various additions, look on eBay or Google Books. Where did Effie purchase it? Was it in New York? Was it in Utah? I needed to look at her timeline. What meaning did it have for her? Again, I could look at her timeline to try to learn more about her life.

Diana (10m 30s):
Why rebind it in leather? So I thought maybe this was a popular hobby at the time. I wanted to know what kind of leather it was. So again, I could look at different types of leather used in binding, and I was curious about the type of paint and could research painting on leather, and it had been etched. So you know, there was something like a little etching tool maybe with heat. And so I could research that it looked like the inner pages that were holding the book to the cover was wallpaper. And I thought I could research wallpaper patterns at the time, maybe upload a photo of it.

Diana (11m 10s):
I wanted to know if the book was popular with the masses so I could search newspapers. And I really wanted to know when this particular edition was published so I could learn more about that company, and I could also learn about how the book was received. Was it popular? Did people like it? so I could research the reviews and the life of the author. And then I wondered if it, the pattern on the front fit with the trunk that Effie had also painted. I thought maybe she had painted both and I could compare colors and patterns. So those were my initial thoughts and brainstorm session ideas.

Nicole (11m 45s):
Wow, you had a lot of really good ideas and so many different things to look into. Well, the next step is to conduct a background literature review to see what has already been written on this item, topic or question. So mom started with the author, JG Holland to learn when he wrote Bittersweet. Wikipedia had a thorough examination of his life from many sources where we can learn that Bittersweet a Poem was published in 1858 and was very popular. So Diana set up a project in Claude 3.5 sonnet in AI, and used it to summarize the Wikipedia article and provide a succinct timeline for Holland’s life.

Nicole (12m 32s):
Next, she added the text of the 216 page poem and a 1940 editorial as a project knowledge and asked for a summary of each one. This saved a lot of time and helped get up to speed with the actual work. So let’s see what Claude had to say. So the timeline of Josiah Gilbert Holland from the Wikipedia article created by Claude talks about how he was born in 1819 in Massachusetts. In 1843, he graduated from Berkshire Medical College, then he got married in 1845, published the Bay State Weekly career in 1847, but it was an unsuccessful venture.

Nicole (13m 16s):
Then he moved to a teaching position in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and then in 1848, he visited Cotton Plantation in Northeastern Louisiana. Then later he returned to Massachusetts. He received an honorary degree from Amherst College, and in 1857 he published the Bay Path, the Tale of Colonial New England Life. And in 1858, he published Titcombs Letters to Young People, Single and Married. And that’s the same year he also published Bittersweet, which sold 90,000 copies by 1894. And then later he built a mansion called Brightwood in North Springfield.

Nicole (13m 58s):
He published a life of Abraham Lincoln. In 1866, he moved to New York City and built a summer house in New York, and then died in 1881. So it kind of shows how Bittersweet was significant in his career. And it was described as a poetic play infused with the beauties of Christianity. It’s interesting that it remained in print for over four decades after his death,

Diana (14m 26s):
Right? And I toyed with the idea of trying to read it, but it was pretty daunting, pretty dense text, You know, written in 1858. So this was really great that I was able to find the book on Google Books. You know, of course it’s out of copyright, in the public domain. And so I, I took the whole book and put it in AI and got a nice summary, which was great. So it was basically this family who was in New England, and they were talking about life. Claude told me that the narrative moves between practical and everyday life in New England households and larger spiritual questions using the domestic setting as a way to explore deeper truths about faith, suffering and redemption.

Diana (15m 10s):
It was a religious text, basically, You know, talking about, about life. And so it was fun to see what it was actually about without having to read it. Very good use of AI in this case. But I next wanted to see if I could learn more about when this edition was published, and that was a little bit more difficult. And so I turned to Perplexity AI to research and Perplexity can search the internet and provide sources. And so I really like it for its searching capabilities. And I was able to find an article that talked about Hurt’s Burnt Leather Edition of the Poets.

Diana (15m 51s):
And this was so exciting because this was the first clue I had that perhaps this little book I had was part of a collection. It wasn’t something that Effie had done, it was something that the publisher had done. And so I found this article via Perplexity, and it showed a book that looked very much like my copy of Bittersweet, same kind of color of cover. And it had a same little flower and etching on the front and a painted hand painted little flower-diddy thing. So it was really the same style as my copy of Bittersweet. And I learned that this collection was adapted for presentation, or keepsake purposes, each volume artistically bound in durable ooze calf with hand painted floral and scenic effects and titles in burnt leather, silver markers, gold tops, each volume, neatly box price, $2.

Diana (16m 49s):
So this was an advertisement that I was able to find. So with that, You know, my thinking started to change about what I had. Well, let’s have a word from our sponsor. Have you ever wished you could step back in time and see the world your ancestors lived in? With Newspapers.com you can. It’s like having a time machine right at your fingertips. With a simple search, you can explore more than a billion pages of historical newspapers dating from 1690 to 2025 from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Uncover the details that bring your family story to life in birth notices, wedding announcements, and obituaries. But it’s not just about facts, it’s about experiencing the moments they live through.

Diana (17m 33s):
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Nicole (17m 58s):
Well, the next step of the historical research process is to refine the research idea and questions. While now that Diana had this new information, she decided upon the question, why did Effie collect this book and possibly rebind it herself? And she settled on this question because the picture of the castle seemed to be different paper than the text. And she wondered if the original binding had fallen apart and used the leather cover in a new binding. And she also wanted to learn more about her life away from Springville, Utah and why Bittersweet might have been important to her. So the next thing to do is to determine what historical methods will be used.

Nicole (18m 42s):
So this is basically research planning. And during this step, we identify and find sources and methodology that might be helpful. So Diana checked her information on Aunt Effie and discovered she was missing several censuses for her life, 1920, 30, and 40, based on the knowledge that she lived in New York City for a time. She guessed the research might take her to that location, but she needed a better starting point. The censuses would hopefully provide that. She also decided to research the additions and availability of Bittersweet. Perhaps she could find a copy for sale on eBay or Etsy.

Nicole (19m 22s):
Newspapers could give more information about this special publication,

Diana (19m 28s):
Right? It was fun to think about all the different things I could research because I’d never really researched Aunt Effie’s life. You know, I knew her and I had pictures of her, so why research her life, right? But it was so fun to dig in and I found her obituary and it detailed her remarkable life as an educator and librarian. I had no idea, oh, all of her different accomplishments. And I saw that she taught at Friends Seminary in New York City. And so that proved that the story that she taught in New York was, was accurate. The obituary also gave me into, in insight into why she collected books. So, you know, I also loved to collect books, and so I completely understand why she had so many books, but my burning question was, where was she in those missing census years?

Diana (20m 20s):
And so I started looking through the censuses, and I found that in 1920 she was in Springville, Utah, where she was born and raised, and she was living with her widowed mother and two brothers, and she was working as a school teacher in the public school. But by 1930, she wasn’t living at home with her mother. And that is the census. I still have not found her in. So I’m hoping someday I will find her. But you know, we know how that goes. Sometimes it’s difficult if they’re moving, or on the road, who knows. But in 1940, I hit gold, and that was where I found her lodging at the Gramercy Hotel in New York City. And her occupation was teaching in a private school.

Diana (20m 60s):
So this completely meshed with the obituaries reporting that she taught at Friends Seminary in New York City, because that is the oldest private school in the United States. So then I turned to Google Maps and found that the Gramercy Hotel and Friends Seminary were only a few blocks away, and Effie could easily have walked to school. And I also learned that Friends Seminary has an archival and manuscript collection at Syracuse University. So it would be really neat to go see if she’s mentioned, if she’s in yearbooks. I mean, I’m sure there are things there, but it’s basically a, you know, an in-person research trip, which would be fun to do.

Nicole (21m 37s):
That would be really fun to do. Wow, what a cool discovery. Well, the next thing you did was to research Bittersweet in historical newspapers and learn that between 1892 and 1916, there were numerous book listings in libraries, reviews and readings, also in clearance sales. Since Bittersweet’s original publication in 1858, numerous editions had been published and were circulating. Well, Diana still had not located an image of the edition that Effie owned, so she turned to eBay and made some exciting discoveries. She found an undated edition with the exact title page published by Hurst and Company, and an inscription gave a date of 1909, and it seemed reasonable that the publishers would use the same edition for the Burnt Leather Series just affixing a different cover.

Nicole (22m 32s):
Interestingly, this book had a portrait of the author opposite the title page, different from the castle Effie’s Bittersweet edition had. Continuing the search on eBay, she found a copy of Bittersweet that matched the title page, and the contents were identical, but the picture opposite the title page was an artistic rendering of a New England scene to match the book. This likely was the original picture included in this special edition.

Diana (22m 58s):
That was so fun to finally find that, and you might wonder why I didn’t find that right away, but sometimes our research takes us on that winding path, right? It wasn’t easy to find it. So it was really exciting to see the same book. And you know, the next step is to evaluate the authenticity and accuracy of your source materials. Well, I couldn’t physically hold that book unless I ordered it, you know, off of eBay. But I could use all the photographs, and luckily whoever put it up did a lot of photographs. And so the Table of Contents page was exactly the same. It showed a couple of pages in the book, and they matched up with the exact page numbers as the copy I had.

Diana (23m 39s):
And when I compare the design on the front, I noticed it was the same etching design. And You know, they obviously had a design. There were little things that were little irregularities in the outlining of it. And I thought that was just Aunt Effie You know, with a shaky hand. But this one had the exact same irregularities, which I thought was super interesting. And it looked like there was maybe a stamp for the lettering, because the lettering did look exactly same, the same, the Bittersweet letter. But I could see little differences in the leaves and the flower, the berries. But each cover was hand worked, so the slight variations would make complete sense.

Diana (24m 19s):
So the final step in this historical research process is to analyze the data and develop a narrative exposition of the findings. So, you know, this is what we teach, analyze the data, write up your findings. And the way I did that was to do my presentation, created the slides, and then writing the blog post. And as I was creating the presentation, I just kept examining this copy of Bittersweet for clues. I was trying to correlate everything I had learned. And remember my original research question was, why did Effie save this book? And did she rebind it to herself? And I concluded that she probably obtained her copy of Bittersweet much later than the original publication of 1909.

Diana (25m 5s):
And I decided that the book had been rebound using the original leather cover. But whoever rebound it just put this random photo of a Scottish castle next to the title page, maybe thinking that that fit with the book. And I had at first thought that she had done it, but then I noticed again that the $1.50 sale price had been erased. And that really provided a great clue and evidence that she purchased the book. So she may have used it in her curriculum as a teacher at Friend Seminary. Maybe she used it in her teaching in the public schools, or collected it as a librarian. I don’t know that I’ll ever know where she actually picked it up.

Diana (25m 46s):
But you know, applying the process to this little item, it was such a great way to stimulate my interest in Effie and to learn much more about her and realize that I have more to learn about her. And hopefully, you know, I actually have other items I’ve inherited for her. And it would be so fun to keep working on learning about her through these items. And I think we can all, you know, take a lesson from this that no matter what, what little item as insignificant as a little book, it can really lead you to learn more about your ancestors.

Nicole (26m 23s):
That is so great. And I really like that you put that clue from the $1.50 written on the inside cover together with the different colored picture of the Scottish castle next to the title page, to kind of figure out that she must have purchased this later from like a used bookstore or something,

Diana (26m 40s):
Right? I’m sure she just came upon it and thought, oh, that’s such a pretty little book. It would be really neat to know. And that’s why I would love to do some research at the archives to see if maybe it had her curriculum be neat to know what she was teaching. You know, I have no idea what would be in that manuscript collection, but it certainly would be fun to see.

Nicole (26m 60s):
Yeah. What subject do you think she was teaching?

Diana (27m 2s):
I think she taught English and literature, You know, as a librarian, that would make sense. So she, she did a lot of teaching. She also taught at Brigham Young University when it, it was called something different. I’m trying to remember what it was called.

Nicole (27m 18s):
The Academy.

Diana (27m 19s):
Yeah. So there’s a lot, perhaps I could find out more about her. She doesn’t have any descendants. She never married. And so I always feel like with people like that, that if we don’t tell their stories, nobody else will.

Nicole (27m 32s):
Agreed. So that’s wonderful that you got to research her life and learn about her and her story, because there may not be other people who do tell her story so great. And we should find out more about her teaching. I think that would be a really fun thing to learn about, especially since we both were teachers. And it would just be a fun thing that we have in common with her to learn about.

Diana (27m 54s):
Right. Okay. I am looking at her obituary again, and she received a normal certificate from Brigham Young University, which I think was a teacher certificate. That’s what that was called. And then she also taught at Columbia University in New York.

Nicole (28m 8s):
Oh my gosh.

Diana (28m 9s):
So she, she did some neat things.

Nicole (28m 11s):
Yeah, she really did. I bet there’s some things that were left behind from her teaching somewhere that would be cool to find them.

Diana (28m 20s):
I know. And here’s another really fun one that was surprising. She was an education director for the Butterick Publishing Company for the seven Western States, and was personnel director for Auerbach Company and later director of an employment agency in San Francisco. Okay. I have no idea about any of that. What, what was going on with that? So she obviously had quite a life, so

Nicole (28m 41s):
Oh my gosh, that’s so cool. Just think how fun it would be to research her whole life and write a biography.

Diana (28m 47s):
Yeah, it would be really fun.

Nicole (28m 48s):
She probably left behind more things that she didn’t give to your mom, or who would’ve inherited them all?

Diana (28m 55s):
Well, when she died, my mom and her sister, my aunt, went to the house and divided things up. And so, and I think maybe her brother’s family took some things as well, but we did get quite a few things. I had the trunk and she had, she just had a really interesting things. She had a little collection of buttons from China that, I don’t know where those came from. She had these really neat silks. She had very interesting things. So I do have a lot of treasures from her that maybe would give me more clues about her life.

Nicole (29m 30s):
Right. And I wonder if she had journals or letters or whatever,

Diana (29m 35s):
A few letters, but they were later in life, all to my mom. She has a few little clues here and there.

Nicole (29m 42s):
Well, it’s so fun how when you start really focusing in on an objective like this, you can learn so much. So what a good example of how you did that and opening up potential future research for Aunt Effie.

Diana (29m 54s):
Right, and what I really, my really big takeaway from the material culture class with Gina was that use the objects. You know, we talked about house histories and we talked about so many different items, furniture, clothing, you know, all these things that we may think, oh, that’s neat, I’ve got that. But we can really research them and add so much context and depth to our ancestors lives. Not to mention that maybe that will encourage our children to keep an item rather than just tossing it if it was, they learn about why it was important to an ancestor.

Nicole (30m 29s):
Love that. Well, thanks everyone for listening today, and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye.

Diana (30m 35s):
All right. Bye-bye.

Nicole (31m 14s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.