Series IV: Anna P. Livingston Papers, 1853-1968

Description of the Papers

Anna Pendleton Livingston's papers contain a selection of letters she received over her lifetime, but are concentrated within the first quarter of the twentieth century, particularly the World War I period. Notable are those sent to her during the war by her brother Archibald, a major in the United States Army's 115th Engineers Expeditionary Force active in the European theater, and by Clyde Vincent Simpson (1898-1947), an officer in Troop H of the 12th Calvary. Anna Livingston met Simpson while he was stationed in Canon City, Colorado, and their relationship continued throughout his thirty-five-year international career with the United States Army. Simpson married Lois Boudinot Keith in 1920; the correspondence files document that union through letters, telegrams, photographs, and pressed flowers. The "marraine de guerre" letters, postcards, and photographs that Livingston received are filed together as a group within the Correspondence subseries; they carry messages of gratitude for her support and her parcels of goods, as well as expressions of friendship toward America and the American soldiers.

Also notable for their international content are thirteen folders holding letters Livingston received from two friends, Elizabeth H. Smith (writing from India and England, 1912-1919), and an otherwise unidentified "C.H.H." (writing from Japan, 1902-1905). The latter file holds an inscribed photograph of "Catherine" placed there during processing because her handwriting matches that in the letters.

Personal Papers primarily contains ephemera and three address books, but also a diary of a camping trip that Anna Livingston took with two female friends through Chaffee County, Colorado, between July 24 and August 17, 1903. Sites mentioned included Salida, Poncha Park, the Taylor and Gunnison rivers, Cottonwood Pass, Monarch Pass, and the Collegiate Peaks; the last pages list the flowers she recognized and a financial accounting of the trip. A photograph album documenting the trip is filed in the following subseries. Also present are three documents signed by Filipino president Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964), which Anna received as a gift in 1900.

The Photographs subseries contains a mix of images: portraits and landscapes, loose photographs and bound photograph albums, postcards and half-tones, and identified and unidentified subjects. Among the earliest is an album of photographs from a childhood summer at the family's home in Newport, Rhode Island. Perhaps most remarkable are the two albums holding snapshots and purchased commercial images from Livingston’s trips to Bermuda (1888 and 1894), Mexico (1895), and Nassau (1897), and her trip with Margaret Aldrich to Hawaii, the Philippines, and Japan (1900). There are also albums containing snapshots of labeled and unidentified images of the American West, often featuring Livingston on horseback, and one which may be images of Casper, Wyoming. Anna and Archibald Livingston were both photographers, often traveled together, and compiled photograph albums; but for their bookplates or handwritten captions, their albums are very similar. Readers should consult both siblings' series when looking for early twentieth-century images of the American West and Southwest.