Collections: T

The second child of attorney George J. Tucker and his first wife, Eunice, Mary E. Tucker was born in Lenox, Mass., ca.1835, and raised there with her elder brother Joseph and sisters Maria, Harriett, and Sarah. Mary died at a tragically young age on August 20, 1855. She is buried with her father and sister Maria in the town’s Church on the Hill Cemetery.

As small as the volume is, it is a complex book, consisting of two main parts, neither with certain authorship. Approximately the first third of the volume is comprised of brief notes on sermons delivered by Congregational minister Edmund K. Alden and other, 1854-1862, while the rest is a well-organized receipt book kept in a different hand. The receipts are arranged in sections devoted to bread and cake, soups, fish, meats, vegetables, pastry, puddings, other desserts, cake, preserves and jellies, miscellaneous, and pickles and sauces. Several recipes are attributed to other writers, including the well-known cookbook author Juliet Corson.

Known for his extensive research into Boston and Merrimac Valley area gravestone carvers, particularly Joseph Lamson and John Hartshorne, Ralph Tucker received the AGS Forbes Award in 1992 for his excellence in carver research. One of the attendees at the inaugural Dublin Seminar, and the first President of the Association for Gravestone Studies, Tucker served as editor of a column, “17th and 18th Century Gravestones and Carvers,” in the AGS Newletter from 1993-1999. Born on May 29, 1921 in Winthrop, Mass., Tucker attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Episcopal Theological School. He married Mildred R. Moore in 1946 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1947. Tucker spent two years as a missionary in China, returning to serve parishes in Utah, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. In addition to extending his ministry to hospitals and prisons, he participated in 1960s Civil Rights protests in Alabama and Boston. In 1985 he went to Zimbabwe as a missionary, retiring to Maine soon thereafter where he acted as interim pastor of Grace Episcopal Church in Bath. Tucker died March 28, 2010, and was survived by his wife, four sons — Ralph, Jr., Richard R., Roger W., and Paul M. Tucker, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Tucker collection includes research notes and copies of published works stemming from Ralph Tucker’s decades of research on stone carvers and other gravestone-related topics, along with hundreds of images documenting carvers and stones in Massachusetts.

Tom Turk played a significant role in the growth of state and community arts agencies across five decades. Beginning his career as an organizer of community arts agencies in Michigan in the mid-1960s, Turk went on to hold leadership positions with community arts agencies in Texas and Tennessee. Active on the national level, he served as a founding member of the Executive Board of the National Assembly of Community Arts Agencies, later the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies (1977-1985), and as president of the United States Urban Arts Federation (1999-2000), the association of local arts council and commission directors in the nation’s fifty largest cities.

Reflecting a long career in community arts, the Turk collection includes rich documentation of three important organizations involved in the development of the field during the late-1970s and early 2000s: the National Assembly of Community Arts Agencies, the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, and the U.S. Urban Arts Federation. The records include a nearly complete run of minutes of the Board and Executive Committee for NACAA and NALAA, along with newsletters and some financial reports, as well as materials relating to the organization and name change.

As a young man in Foxcroft, Maine, Abel Turner was caught up in the evangelical revivals and converted to Free Will Baptism, becoming a minister by the age of 21. Beginning in the backwoods settlements, Turner spent the better part of a decade attempting to “convert sinners” in Piscataquis and Penobscot Counties and the in the Burned-Over District of New York state, from Utica to Penn Yan and Cattaraugus County.

Written for his wife, Abel Turner’s long and detailed autobiography is a remarkable record of a young Free Will Baptist minister’s labors during the Second Great Awakening. Beginning with his childhood in Maine and his conversion experience, the manuscript provides insight into Turner’s experiences preaching in the rough-hewn interior settlements of Maine and the Burned-Over District of New York from roughly 1821 through 1839. In addition to some wonderful commentary on evangelical religion in the heart of the Awakening and on Turner’s own spiritual development, the memoir includes fascinating descriptions of the towns and people he met along the way.

Robert W. Tuthill taught epidemiology at UMass Amherst for nearly three decades and championed the libraries by both serving on the Friends of the Library board and bringing his students into the stacks for class assignments. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Penna., Tuthill attended high school in Newton, Mass., and earned an associate’s degree from Newton Junior College before coming to the University of Massachusetts. At UMass, he majored in sociology, graduating in 1956, and served at the Valley Forge Army Hospital before returning to academia at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a master’s degree in sociology. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, he studied epidemiology, earning his Ph.D. in 1970. When Tuthill returned to UMass to join the faculty in 1970, it was to start the epidemiology program, which would be part of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Tuthill joined the Friends of the Library board in 1988 and served for nearly fifteen years, including a term as president. In 2003, he was honored with the Libraries’ Siegfried Feller Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service. Tuthill retired from UMass in 1998.

The Tuthill Papers contain teaching materials from some of the notable courses Tuthill taught at UMass, including Environmental Epidemiology and Biases in Epidemiologic Research; a small amount of research materials associated with an ADD/ADHD study; and copies of his publications, which included studies involving a variety of public health issues, from lead poisoning and smoking to family planning and cancer. Much of Tuthill’s research took place in the Western Massachusetts region.

A farmer and laborer in Antrim, N.H., Thomas Dimon Twiss was born in Beverly, Mass., in 1801. At the age of 24, Twiss married a local Antrim woman, Betsey Brackett, with whom he raised a family of three children.

This typical single-column account book of the mid-nineteenth century records Twiss’s diverse economic transactions, providing labor for the town in “braking rods” [breaking roads] and “digin graves”and to neighbors and for a wide variety of manual farm labor, including killing hogs, plowing, threshing, haying, and assorted carpentry work.

The shoemaker, Philemon L. Tyler, was born in Massachusetts in 1812. He and his wife Tersilla, also a native of Massachusetts, settled in New York some time before the birth of their first child in 1838. By 1850, after at least a decade in the village of Springville in the agricultural town of Concord, New York, Tyler had three children, and real estate valued at $4,400.

Daybooks include a record of the prices of boots and shoes, and the method and form of payment (rarely cash, sometimes labor, but often apples, potatoes, chicken, wheat, mutton, pork, beef, hay, and other farm products such as cow hides and calf skins).

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Maria Tymoczko was lured away from the study of biochemistry into medieval literature, remaining at Harvard through her doctorate and eventually making the subject into an academic career. Since joining the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1974, she has written or edited six books and has built an international reputation in three fields: Celtic medieval literature, Irish studies, and translation studies. A popular instructor, she has also played a leading role on several university committees.

The Tymoczko Papers document both the career and university service of a scholar of Irish literature and theorist of translation. In addition to her professional correspondence (1973-1980), the collection includes a significant quantity of material documenting Tymoczko’s university service, including notes from her time as chair of the General Education Council (1986-1994), from the Joint Task Force of UMass and Community College Relations, and the Rules Committee and Ad-hoc Committee on Retention of Administrators of the Faculty Senate. Additions to the collection are expected in the future.