Hawks, Alice Totman

Born on January 29, 1908 in Conway, Massachusetts, Alice Totman spent her early years on her father’s family farm, Page Place, before he was forced to sell it due to a labor scarcity in 1916 and moved the family to Greenfield. She graduated from Greenfield High School in 1927 and enrolled at Massachusetts School of Art in Boston. She studied there for a year and a half before marrying Hart Mowry Hawks on June 16, 1929. The couple settled in Bellows Fall, Vermont where Mowry was recently assigned a permanent post with the Boston and Maine Railroad. Tragically, over the next fifteen years, Alice experienced seven pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a healthy child, Gertrude Ann, born in 1932. Alice’s interest in her family can be traced back to the earliest days of her marriage, during which time she worked on genealogies for both the Totman and Hawks families. Eager to share the knowledge she acquired and assembled, she often found ways to update her relatives, most notably in a family newsletter called Tot-Kin that she edited and published between the years 1935-1945.

Alice Totman Hawks’s collection consists of her extensive genealogical notes and writings, including a run of Tot-Kin, correspondence and some of Alice’s sketches.