The Letter

A few decades ago, I ran across a quoted passage from a letter written by Sophia Graves Realf. It read, in part:

“I learned by these letters that he had gone directly to New York City from Vicksburg. After reading them I determined that if domestic ties were burdensome to him, he should never be annoyed or troubled by me. He might seek me if he chose, but I would never go to him. I knew that I had made a marriage that could only bring misery in some form or other, and I accepted the penalty without a murmur.”

I wanted to read the entire letter so I might discover more. And because she never had children of her own who might claim her many years later, I decided to claim her as dear to me as any grandmother.

Only one problem — the letter I needed to see was somewhere in a large collection of Richard Josiah Hinton’s papers at the Kansas State Library in Topeka.

Last summer, I drove 2,200 miles to Texas gather with my sisters, and on my way home, drove due north to Topeka for a few days of research. I was breathless with excitement when I presented myself at the desk with the call numbers to the file. The clerk sent an assistant into the climate-controlled warehouse of Kansas history.

“I’m sorry,” the assistant said when she came back. “It’s not there.”

“What?” I croaked, partly because I was freaking out, and partly because I’d recently had a treatment on my larynx and croaking was about all I could muster. “Online it says Hinton’s papers are at this library.”

“Well, sometimes they get moved,” the clerk said, and went back to cutting slips of paper, the task she had been doing when I walked up to her desk.

“I just drove two thousand miles,” I whispered, because I didn’t want to croak at her.

The assistant said, “I’ll check again.”

She came back with a relatively small folder. I’d been expecting the cubic feet described on the library’s website, but a folder was better than nothing.

Sadly, the letter wasn’t there. I had copies made of a few interesting items I found and returned the following day. With relief, I saw a young man at the desk instead of the dismissive clerk of yesterday, and asked him where the cubic feet of Richard J. Hinton’s papers might have been moved.

He checked the computer, then looked up and smiled. “Microfilm. I’ll show you where to find them.”

Off we went. He led me to where the microfilm cabinets were, then took me and my little boxes of film to a reader, showed me how to thread them, handed me a thumb drive, and taught me how to save images of any records I wanted to take home.

Lesson number one: If at first you don’t succeed, pry, pry again, but remain courteous even if the clerk isn't.

Lesson number two: Never expect that you can do your research in a state library in an afternoon, or even in a day. I already knew that lesson, so I had booked a room for three nights, giving myself two and half days to pursue Richard Hinton’s files.

I didn’t find the letter.

I found a dozen of them — and at least a dozen more I hadn’t known I would want. I also found the letter within the passage of the letter that had sent me on the quest in the first place.

And now, after all those miles, all that microfilm, and all those questions asked one more time, the story behind that letter is finally online.

That’s the thing about research. Online collections are wonderful, but they are not the whole world. Sometimes the thing you need is not behind a search bar, but in a state library, a university archive, a county courthouse, or a roll of microfilm waiting for somebody stubborn enough to ask one more question.

So, if you’re a researcher, don’t rely only on what you can find online. Leave your office now and then. Plan a vacation near a state library or university that holds the collections you need. Give yourself more than one afternoon. Bring a thumb drive. Bring patience. And if someone tells you the records aren’t there, take a breath and ask again because catalogs can be incomplete and collections can be misdescribed. And clerks can be wrong.

I hope you will enjoy reading, I Was His Wife, the Story of Sophia Emery Graves Realf  as much as I found compiling and writing it.