Roosevelt-Derby-Williams papers

The papers consist of material from three generations of Roosevelt women--Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, Ethel Roosevelt Derby, and Edith Roosevelt Derby Williams--and material of others that came into the possession of one or another of the women, including material of Theodore Roosevelt, Emily Tyler Carow, Quentin Roosevelt, Richard Derby, and others. The papers are chiefly letters, telegrams, and postcards, also include photographs, compositions, documents, and printed ephemera. The bulk of the correspondence is among mother, daughter, and granddaughter, with other letters to and from friends of the Roosevelt family, political figures, literary figures, and others, including Flora Whitney Miller, Robert Harry Munro Ferguson, Hector Munro-Ferguson, Archibald B. Roosevelt, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Bertha Benkard Rose, and Olivia Cutting. The papers also include a sizeable amount of material concerning Quentin Roosevelt and his service and death in France in World War One, as well as other materials concerning family service both in the war and domestically.

Many of the letters included enclosures, such as letters received by the letter-writer, the correspondence of others, photographs, and clippings. These were kept with the letters in which they were enclosed and described in notes. Even letters to or from family members that have their own correspondence sections in the collection were maintained as enclosures. For a complete sense of the letters included, a name search is suggested. Many of the letters also had the envelopes in which they were sent. Sometimes the dates for letters were taken from the postmark on the letters.

The papers are arranged by recipients of the letters and aligning papers for those recipients. They are listed in a generational hierarchy. The major correspondents have sections of letters written to them and some sections written from them. Letters were first sorted by who they were written to so letters to an individual will appear in their letters to section, even when they are from individual who have correspondence sections.