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Dear Millie...

 

Dear Millie
or
The I Love "Lucy Letters"
or
How I was Tricked into a History Obsession


Lucy Ellen (Clark) Shinn
***UPDATE 1/2023: The Lucy Letters are now online! 

Dear Millie…

This was my introduction to the Shinn family, an early “pioneer” family in Alameda County. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us started “pandemic projects.” Some people learned how to make a sourdough starter, others leaned into their interest in indoor plants, and still others took on home renovation projects.

Kathryn, a descendant of the Shinn family took on one such pandemic project: transcribing a sheaf of letters written by Lucy Ellen Shinn (1826-1915) to her daughter, Milicent “Millie” Washburn Shinn (1858-1940) between the years 1874-1881. This descendant very graciously donated these letters to the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation (MPHF), the organization that manages Shinn House. The letters, being close to 150 years old(!), needed to be safely rehoused, organized, and scanned—this is where I came in. 

Milicent Washburn Shinn
MPHF had received a grant from the California State Library’s program, California Revealed, which “helps public libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other heritage groups digitize, preserve, and provide online access to materials documenting the state’s history, art, and cultures.” My family is involved with MPHF, and I was roped into the processing of these letters, at first out of necessity due to COVID-19, but soon I found myself completely invested in this family’s story.

Why preserve these letters? Well, the Shinns were quite an interesting family. As it turns out, Millie was the first woman to be granted a PhD by the University of California, Berkeley in 1898. Her dissertation was based on the detailed notes she kept tracking the physical growth and emotional development of her niece, Ruth. [My undergraduate degree is in psychology, and I got my Master’s (in social welfare) from UC Berkeley, so my interest was immediately piqued.] I would gradually come to get to know Millie and her family through her mother’s letters. And I would come to appreciate Lucy’s sense of humor and her perceptive observations of human behavior.
Illustration of the Shinn home and orchards from 
Colquhoun & Moore's 1893 Illustrated album of Alameda Co.     

Many of the letters were undated (I’m sure neither Lucy nor Millie imagined strangers would be reading their private correspondence decades later, so they weren’t keeping us historians in mind). For the past year, I have read through all 110+ letters, playing detective, finding clues to try to place when each letter was written. Through that, I went on many research rabbit-holes and amassed a bunch of useless knowledge about certain very specific aspects of life in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1870s and 1880s. 


The further I got into my research, the more I felt like this meme: 

Screencap from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I needed my own wall with red string to map out the many connections I made the more familiar I became with the Shinn family and the time period.

This blog will have two main foci:
  • Snippets from “the Lucy Letters” (as we call them) and information about the Shinn family during the late 19th and early 20th century.
  • Special features that I’ll call “Shinn-digs,” because I often found myself digging through poorly OCR’d newspapers, vital records, and mildewed papers that had been stored in the basement for decades, trying to find anything that could help me date each letter. In that process, I ran across many interesting stories and other tidbits that should be shared with the world.
So if you’ve found yourself on this blog, thank you for being here! Maybe you will fall in love with the Shinns like I did.

Shinn House in 2022

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References

California Revealed. n.d. https://californiarevealed.org/.

Colquhoun, Jos. Alex., and E. S. Moore. Illustrated Album of Alameda County, California; Its Early History and Progress—Agriculture, Viticulture and Horticulture—Educational, Manufacturing and Railroad Advantages—Oakland and Environs—Interior Townships—Statistics, Etc., Etc. Oakland, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Company, 1893. http://archive.org/details/illustratedalbum00colq.



Mission Peak Heritage Foundation. n.d. http://www.missionpeakreporter.org/.

Shinn, Milicent Washburn. Notes on the Development of a Child. Berkeley: The University, 1893. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010118245.

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