Caroline Wells Healey Dall and family correspondence (Ms.83.4)

The collection consists of 242 items: the 231 items in manuscript format include autograph and typescript letters and notes, and a codicil to the last will and testament of Caroline Wells Healey Dall; the 11 printed items are clippings from newspapers.

The correspondence is almost exclusively of a personal nature and consists of letters exchanged within the family circle, as well as letters to the family from friends and acquaintances. The two largest groups of letters are those received by Caroline Wells Healey Dall and by her daughter, Sarah Keene Healey Dall Munro. Other groups of letters were received by various family members.

Caroline Dall's correspondents include Mabel G. Bell, wife of Alexander Graham Bell, Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland, William Baxter Palmer Closson, Charles William Eliot, Francis Jackson Garrison, Henry Charles Lea, Grace Denio Litchfield, Mary Jane Rathbun, and Bailey Willis.

Sarah Munro's correspondents include Admiral George Eugene Belknap and his wife Frances Prescott Belknap, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Edward Everett Hale, Endicott Peabody, Dr. Frederick Peterson, and Barrett Wendell.

Willis Munro's correspondents include Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Sr. and Alfred Goldsborough Mayor.

In a reflective letter of January 1889, two years after her husband's death, Caroline Dall explains to her children the difficulties she endured to support herself and them during their father's long absence. She refers to Rev. Dall's "monomaniacal devotion to his Indian mission" and his order of priorities in which his family responsibilities appeared to have no place.

Sarah Munro's concern with epilepsy is revealed in the letters she received from Dr. Frederick Peterson, a researcher on mental illness, and from Dr. William Philip Spratling of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in Sonyea, New York. Her child, Charles, who was living with epilepsy, appears once in the collection as the author of a letter to his mother.

William Healey Dall is represented in the collection by his letters to his mother, Caroline Dall, to his sister, Sarah Munro, to his wife, Annette Whitney Dall, and by a clipping of his poem titled "The Sea is Thine and Thou Madest It" (July 1899, Bering Sea), as it appeared in the Christian Register.