Collecting area: New England

Margaret R. Jenks has been a family genealogist since 1964 and a cemetery transcriber since 1978. A prolific writer, she has published books listing all the cemetery inscriptions of the twenty-seven towns in Rutland County, Vermont, and of Granville, Washington County, New York, and she has conducted research on the stonecarvers of Rutland County. She served six years as a trustee of the Association for Gravestone Studies.

The Jenks collection is comprised of eighteen volumes containing exhaustive documentation of gravestone inscriptions from the following cemeteries in Vermont: Benson, Brandon, Castleton, Chittenden, Clarendon, Danby, Fair Haven, Granville (Washington County), Hubbardston, Ira, Mendon, Middleton, Mount Holly, Mt. Tabor, Pawlet, Pittsfield, Pittsford, Poultney, Proctor, Putney, Rutland, Sherburne, Shrewsbury, Sudbury, Tinmouth, Wallingford, Wells, West Haven, West Rutland.

Father and son wood turners, manufacturers of ladders, and general wood workers from the Loudville section of Westhampton, Massachusetts. Includes names of customers and businesses (bulk of the accounts are with local lumber and furniture dealers S.M. Smith Co., E.H. Lyman, Medad Pomeroy, and Charles Loud & Co.), items sold (such as bureaus, tables, and lumber), furniture that they repaired, and supply items which they acquired (such as varnish, stain, glass, tacks). Also contains documentation of employee payment, flour, tow, sugar, and coffee purchases, and employee lost work days.

Raised on Long Island, Ed Judice embarked on a path in photography at the age of 13 when he took a job sweeping floors in a local photo studio. After picking up work photographing locally and a stint in the army, he moved to New York city, Judice began doing commercial work for ad agencies and magazines and eventually with Polaroid. Through Polaroid, he began developing contacts in western Massachusetts, eventually moving to Wendell in the early 1970s. He maintains an active studio in Northampton.

The Judice collection consists of a series of 59 digital images relating to a photo documentation project at the Rodney Hunt factory in Orange, Mass., in 1973 and 1974; a series of photographs documenting the bicentennial of Wendell in 1981; and two video documentaries of the Three County Fair, Northampton, Mass., 2007, and “Benny and Joe: A friendship,” 2010.

Judy Polan, ca. 1984

Judy Polan was a folk musician who performed primarily throughout Western Mass and New England in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in 1948 in Albany, New York, she graduated from Barnard College in 1970 with a degree in Russian. She worked as a translator in Cambridge, Massachusetts and taught guitar lessons part-time before eventually moving to teaching and performing full time. She married Michael Schonbach in 1975 and moved to Western Mass two years later, living first in Northampton and then Chesterfield. During this period, her music career blossomed. She quickly became a favorite at local coffeehouses and other venues such as the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton the Sounding Board Coffeehouse in West Hartford, and Passim in Cambridge, playing both original songs and covers from a wide variety of genres. She was a four-time recipient of the “favorite musician” award in the Valley Advocate Reader’s Poll in 1985, 1993, 1994, and 1995. She was frequently played on radio stations throughout New England and Upstate New York. Polan also performed at weddings and children’s events. Her husband, Michael Schonbach often accompanied her on violin.

She released her first album, Judy, Judy, Judy in 1984 on her own record label, Ruby Slippers Records. The name was an homage to her love of the Wizard of Oz, songs from which would often feature in her shows. She was known by her fans as the “Folk Glitter Queen of New England”, due to her eclectic style of both music and costume, which often featured glittery red high heels fashioned after Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz. Over the course of her career she released two more full-length albums and one EP, Look to the Starsin 1986, Dream Dances in 1992 and Daffodils in 1996. Also in 1996, she released a musical interpretation of the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, which was used in a tourism campaign for the Lake District in Northwest England. During the early 2000s, Polan’s career shifted to writing, and she worked as an editor and writer for magazines such as Style 1900, Modernism and Jewish Ledger. She mainly wrote about design and travel and maintained a website and blog, Mad for Mod, throughout the 2010s. She also wrote humorous audio memoir essays that were featured on the Albany, NY NPR affiliate, WAMC. She also published a book of poetry, Glasgow Colours at a Decorative Arts Programme at the University of Glasgow. Her husband Michael passed away on June 16, 2022.

The Judy Polan Papers contain material from throughout Polan’s career as a working musician. This includes promotional materials such as concert flyers, profiles in local publications, business and personal correspondence, sheet music, and lyrics. It also contains several dozen recordings contained on different formats such as reels, cassette tapes, records and CDs. These consist of commercial releases, live shows, radio appearances, demo recordings, and master tapes. Polan’s ruby slippers, that she wore during performances, are also part of the collection.

The organization Justice for Woody (JFW) was formed in December of 2001 in the weeks immediately following the death of Robert “Woody” Woodward, a political and environmental activist, social worker, teacher, and mountaineer. JFW seeks not only to honor Woody’s legacy, but also to advocate for a fair an independent investigation. The collection consists primarily of newspaper articles from various New England papers as well as Attorney General Sorrell’s Report and an independent analysis of it.

An artist, writer, and activist for the disabled, Paul S. Kahn was born on Nov. 6, 1945, into a second-generation family of Jewish immigrants in Auburndale, Mass. Early in life, Kahn rebelled against the perceived “powerlessness” of the neuromuscular disorder with which he was born, pursuing an artistic, academic, and activist life. While studying drawing, painting, and sculpture at Boston University and earning a MA in counseling at Northeastern (1982), Kahn became an activist in the independent living movement and a pioneer in advocating for personal care assistance. Living independently from 1979, he worked as staff therapist at the Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, as leader of a support group for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and as a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Commission on Disability Policy. In 1980, Kahn met Ruth Stern, who would become his frequent collaborator and wife of 21 years. As Kahn’s physical condition weakened after 1987 and he became dependent upon a ventilator, his creative focus shifted increasingly from art to writing and editing. The last two decades of his life were remarkably productive, resulting in over twenty plays and dozens of published essays and poems, and he was the long-time editor of the newsletter Disability Issues. Kahn died on Jan. 1, 2010.

Paul Kahn’s papers are a reflection of the intensely creative life of a committed activist. The collection centers on Kahn’s literary work, including manuscripts of his plays, essays, and poetry, but it includes numerous examples of his artwork and a number of home movies and tape recordings from his childhood.

Karl S. Finison was an undergraduate (class of 1975) and then graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, studying Anthropology and local agricultural history. His 1979 master’s thesis “Energy Flow on a Nineteenth Century Farm,” was a part of a Anthropology Department research series on the ecological anthropology of the Middle Connecticut River Valley, studying demographic and other trends from 1650 to 1900 in the area. Part of this work was supported in 1970s by the Connecticut Valley Population Ecology Project. While doing this work, Finison also began to collect agricultural journals, books, and original manuscripts about the ecological history of Upper and Middle Connecticut River Valley.

This collection consists of five original accounting logs and ledgers from western Massachusetts and southern Vermont, offering insight into the commerce and community in these areas in the 19^th-century and early 20^th-century:

• An 1803-1826 account book covers agricultural and business transactions in the Middle Connecticut River Valley, including in such Massachusetts towns as Chester, Granby, Northampton, Northfield, and Shelburne.
• A ledger of the accounts of E. F. Reed and Co. (Dummerston, VT) from 1883-1894, is the only volume with a known authorial origin.
• A mixed-use logbook includes 1845-1846 worker logs (lumber industry) in Ashfield, MA; 1849 diary and expense entries from Shelburne Falls, MA; diary entries from 1851, ca. 1855, and 1878; and undated “little sermons.”
• An account book of unknown origin, 1881-1905, mainly transactions regarding  shoes, boots, and harnesses.
• A “Time Book,” tracking the labor of agricultural workers at an unknown location in summer 1912.

Founded in Amherst, Mass., by Paula Green and associates in 1994, the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding addresses the global challenges of ethnic, religious, and political conflict. Often partnering with other regional, governmental, educational, or religious organizations, the Center regularly conducts courses, workshops, and other programs with the goal of addressing the root causes of conflict, preventing escalation, and fostering reconciliation. From their early efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo, they have branched out to more than twenty countries, including Afghanistan, Nepal, South Africa, and Palestine.

The Karuna Center collection is a record of an industrious organization committed to building peace internationally. The Center retains records of each international program, including copies of materials used during training and workshops and photographs and summary reports of their activities.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Denise Karuth and Fred Pelka are activists and historians of the disability rights movement based in Massachusetts. Both are graduates of SUNY Buffalo, while Karuth holds a masters in rehabilitation counseling from Boston State College and a masters in divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. Karuth came into activism through her church’s involvement in the civil rights movement and her own experience as a student dealing with blindness and multiple sclerosis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After moving to Boston, her activism continued in efforts by the disability community to secure accessible and affordable mass transit in Massachusetts, and she has been involved with a broad spectrum of disability campaigns and organizations, serving as a peer counselor for people with disabilities, as Executive Director of Boston Self-Help Center, as a consultant on disability issues for the Human Genome Initiative, as a grant writer at the Stavros Center for Independent Living, and as Chair of the Governor’s Commission on Accessible Transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis. She has also been an advocate for people who are homeless and was a principal founder of the First Church Shelter of the First Church in Cambridge. Karuth’s lifelong partner Fred Pelka, himself a person with disabilities, became involved in disability rights activism in 1983 while working at the Boston Center for Independent Living, and has made an impact as an editor and prolific author since. A 2004 Guggenheim Fellow, he has written three books on disability issues: The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (1997), The Civil War Letters of Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps (2004), and What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (2012). His fourth book, A Different Blaze, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2014, and is his first published poetry.

The Karuth and Pelka collection documents thirty years of social justice activism in Massachusetts centered on the movement for disability rights. Beginning in the1980s struggle for accessibility in transportation, the collection reflects the breadth of Karuth’s commitments and work on issues ranging from apartheid and US imperialism to homelessness and HIV/AIDS, and her work with organizations such as First Church in Cambridge, Amnesty International, Not Dead Yet, the Governor’s Council of Accessible Transportation, and the Boston Self Help Center. Pelka’s part of the collection contains extensive research and background material, notes, and drafts for each of his books, including lengthy transcripts of interviews with pioneers in disability rights.

A veteran of the peace movement and founder of the Traprock Peace Center (1979), Randy Kehler was active in the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Peace Development Fund, and the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. Beginning in 1977, he and his wife became war tax resisters, withholding federal income tax to protest U.S. military expenditures, donating it instead to charity. As a consequence, their home was seized by the IRS in 1989, setting up a protracted legal struggle that resulted in Kehler’s arrest and imprisonment and the sale of the house. They remain tax resisters.

The Kehler Papers document the five year struggle (1989-1994) against the seizure and sale of the Kehlers’ home by the IRS. The collection includes meeting minutes, notes, correspondence, newspaper clippings; letters to the editor, essays, articles, plans and strategy documents for the vigil set outside the Kehler home; support committee information and actions; correspondence with government officials, the IRS, and the Justice Department; letters of support; documents from the legal proceedings; and political literature addressing the Kehlers’ situation.