Manuscript Bereavement commonplace book (Addition 70) 2024-0148, 1856, 1874

This addition to MSS 16758, The University of Virginia Collection on the History of Childhood, Parenting, and Family Building, contains one volume of an anonymous bereavement commonplace book, dated 1856 and 1874. The manuscript consists of ninety-eight pages of writing, with the rest left blank. The manuscript contains writings by three different women. The first (and most extensive) is by an unnamed governess who writes of the loss of a child in her care, Harry. Her spidery handwriting is even and accomplished, and her use of "thee" and "thou" throughout suggests she may have been a Quaker. For thirty pages, she expresses her heartfelt love for the child and her grief during Harry's decline. She describes her memories of the boy and his siblings and details the boy's last illness, of about six days' duration, and death.

The following forty-eight pages include bereavement verses including poetry, both original and copied from published works, segments of stories, and verses from the bible. within these pages, the Governess left three pages blank; on the first of these blank pages, "M.E.G." [later identified as Mary E. Grote] wrote about the death of her firstborn son, "Ernie," whose father was Ernest William Davis. In the first line of her text, Grote refers to the manuscript itself as "this choice collection."

The verse then continues in the governess' hand. Until another passage by Mary Grote appears. It is a five-page memorial titled "To Ernie," dated August 30th, 1874. It is possible that Grote's earlier one-page passage may have been written in 1874. Fourteen blank leaves separate Grote's writing to an entirely different hand and content.

There are five pages of "Hints For Housewives." These undated, unrelated notes seem to be brief views on issues that arise in a household including damp cupboards, flies, roasting meat, buying eggs, mending china, and other domestic matters.