Correspondence between three generations of the Michel and Bartholomew families, ranging from 1847-1913. Both families were highly educated, literate, and interested in politics, which is apparent in many of their writings. Topics covered in the letters include courtships, family relations, life in California in the 1880s, female college students at Urbana and Bryn Mawr University, the 1884 presidential election, and Swedenborigan philosophy. Also includes some photographs and ephemera.

Mary Eletra Loveridge Michel (1828-1883) was born in Virginia, although her parents were natives of Massachusetts. Like many of her female descendants, Mary was an avid reader and follower of the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. She had a least one brother, John Loveridge, who died of illness in Kentucky. Sometime after 1847 Mary married Dr. Robert B. Michel (1824-1896), who was born in Pennsylvania to a French father and American mother and served in the Confederate Army with the 2nd Mississippi State Cavalry. Robert’s sister Elizabeth Michel Blair (1825-c.1925) married John Blair (1819-1894) in 1844. Robert also had at least two brothers, William A. Michel (who traveled to California in 1853) and James G. Michel. Robert and Mary had at least four children: Ralph, Mary, Annie, and Elizabeth. Dr. Ralph S. Michel (1851-1933) married Genevieve “Jennie” Gebhard (1871-1948). Both are buried in Springboro Cemetery, Warren County, Ohio. Annie Michel was born in Ohio in 1863 and may have married a man named Miller. Elizabeth Michel McKeown (b.1867) attended Urbana University and married John McKeown. Mary M. Michel Bartholomew (Oct.21, 1858-July 13, 1912) was Mary and Robert Michel’s oldest daughter. She married Dr. James N. Bartholomew in Springboro, Ohio, in September 1884 and moved with him to Los Alamos, California, where Dr. Bartholomew practiced medicine in a rural area. Mary spent much of her time homesick, and wrote often to her sisters and close friend Florence Bedford. By the mid-1880s the Bartholomews had moved to Ohio, where their oldest child, Mary Eleanor, was born in 1885. Their son Robert was born on December 30, 1890, and attended Purdue University. The Bartholomews’ daughter Mary Eleanor Bartholomew, known as Eleanor, was born on December 30, 1885, in Trenton, Ohio. She attended Lakeview High School in Chicago and the Pratt Institute High School in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a bachelor’s degree in Latin and English in 1909. Following her graduation she taught English at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr for two years. She appears to have married a man named Fogg. She died in Pasadena, California, in March 1970.

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