Sawin-Young Family Papers

The Sawin-Young Family Papers contains a small number of letters and photographs documenting the lives and relationships of two families from Holyoke, Mass., during the years 1863 to 1924. The 18 letters, two postcards, newspaper article, and photographs provide insight into the close bonds forged between the Sawins and Youngs. The majority of letters in this collection were exchanged between siblings Elizabeth, Jane, Sarah, and Allan Young between 1863 and 1884, with the photographs documenting later generations. A highlight of the collection is a photograph album, ca.1901, kept by Alice E. Sawin that depicts family, friends, and the Sawin household in Holyoke.

The correspondence is almost exclusively personal in nature, with topics ranging from a father’s inquiry into his daughter’s life at college to letters revealing a man’s life in the American West during the 1880s. Although the lives represented are ordinary in every sense, they can be revealing, with each writer and each recipient seeming to have a distinct personality and distinct feeling at the moment of exchange. The decisions they make, the letters they send, and the pictures they take offer a deeper glance into American life in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

In his letters home to his sister Sarah,1881-1884, three letters each from Montana and Utah, Allan Young displayed his feelings about life out west as he moved from state to state and job to job, and how much he missed home, and the letters also shed light on the Young family dynamics and the personalities of the sisters. Lizzie, for example, comes across as dominant personality, even controlling. The quieter Jane exchanged a number of letters with Lizzie between 1863 and 1865, trading gossip about their towns and chatting about their most recent dinner parties, their clothes, or simple day to day activities. Sarah later married Charles Tower, while Agnes married a Mr. Wright. The collection also includes letters from James Young (the father) to Jane and Sarah, and a letter from Robert Young to James which hints at the still-close relationship they still held with family in Scotland.

The collection includes a few items pertaining to a later generation, including several photographs, some postcards, and a letter to Beatrice Sawin (1894-1979), living the marvelous life of a 19 year-old student at Wheaton College, and causing her father, Walter E. Sawin, concern about her priorities in her studies. Walter Sawin was an engineer on the Holyoke Dam.

The Sawins and Youngs were an ordinary, middle class Massachusetts family, but their dynamic personalities and adventures shine through. The photographs and photo album put faces to names, and help piece together the story of these two families, the places they traveled, the houses they lived in, and the people and things they liked.