College Records Add New Depth to Women’s Genealogy

-This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan and Wanda Whitney in the History and Genealogy Section. Buchanan wrote the first entry; Whitney, the second.

Lucy Lazear, the valedictorian of her 1853 graduating class at Waynesburg Female Seminary in Pennsylvania, paused her commencement speech to thank Margaret Bell, a key member of the faculty.

“That sisterly devotion which labored so ardently for our good — making our interests her own, that affectionate sympathy which joined in all our sorrows, that sweet gentleness which calmed every ruffled feeling, forgave every error, and threw a mantle of charity over our weaknesses, all contributed largely to hallow our school days,” Lazear said, no doubt delighting her teacher and touching the crowd.

Today, the student-thanks-inspirational-teacher moment is standard feature of commencement speeches, but Lazear’s was strikingly original. Women were just being allowed to attend colleges and universities in significant numbers (powered by the seminary movement, designed to train women to become teachers and educators), and their intellectual, personal and professional lives were beginning to blossom in ways that would change American society.

In turn, the records female students left behind at these early institutions created a genealogical window into women’s lives that had not previously existed. For decades to come, school was an exceptional period of independence for women. It was often the only time when they were identified as individuals, rather than someone’s daughter, wife or mother.

So today at the Library, and at university and local libraries across the country, we can find a unique trove of material about those young women in their own right — matriculation cards, course catalogs, graduation programs, minutes of literary societies and other social organizations, newsletters, yearbooks and alumni directories.

Within the larger community, school activities and interactions prompted targeted newspaper ads, articles and social columns. The networks of classmates and friends formed at school created letters, photograph albums and autograph books. All of this rich background fleshes out the individual lives of women in ways that we would not otherwise know.

Lucy, for example: She was born Sept. 23, 1835, in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where she appears in the 1850 census as a 15-year-old student in the household of her father, future U.S. Rep. Jesse Lazear. The Waynesburg Female Seminary was founded in 1849 by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, just one year after the historic women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.

The family was comfortable; Thomas, her brother, was enrolled at Harvard.

Meanwhile, Lucy found that her seminary offered classes in grammar, rhetoric, algebra, trigonometry, geography, history, physiology, botany, chemistry, political science and religious studies. There were options to study languages: Greek, Latin and French.

Lucy excelled at her studies and, one can tell, chafed at the limitations of the era. In her handwritten valedictory speech (preserved in the Waynesburg University archives, along with the rest of her papers), she called on the school’s trustees to “open the fields of Literature to the female as to the male.”

She joined the faculty two years later, teaching instrumental music. The seminary soon was abandoned, as Waynesburg College began offering a coeducational curriculum, resulting in bachelor’s degrees for women and men by 1857.

She did not live to see the day.

Her papers show that she met and fell in love with Kenner Stephenson, her brother’s Harvard classmate. They were married on New Year’s Day, 1856, and the couple departed on a bridal trip in an open sleigh, crossing the frozen Ohio River. She contracted a cold and returned to Waynesburg. She died April 6, 1856, just 20 years old.

Without her college papers, how little we would have known of her short, vibrant life.

—Candice Buchanan.

In modern times, college documents helped me flesh out the experiences of Thaye Ann Richards Kearns, a family friend, fellow church member and an older classmate at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College).

Ann, who would devote her life to early childhood education, was in college during the turbulent years of 1965 to 1969, when the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were convulsing the country. She was a mathematics major, but I was able to track down much more about her from the historical records, many of them here at the Library.

For starters, she played a key role in the university’s integration, as she was one of the first two Black women admitted as regular students in 1965, as documented in “Maconiana,” a history of the college.

The school’s weekly newspaper, The Sundial, which has been digitized as part of the Virginia Newspaper Program, Virginia Chronicle, was a key source in documenting Ann’s college days, as was its yearbook, Helianthus. The annual course catalogs were invaluable. Taken together, these helped me understand what life was like for Ann and other students — dorms had maids! laundry service! — and the social milieu in which she came into adulthood.

“Your attire is to be classic,” The Sundial reported in a tongue-in-cheek editorial aimed at new students the year Ann arrived, “however, this excludes those types of drapes known by the public as ‘shifts’ because it has been called to the attention of the management that these kangaroo-pocketed apparels have been known to camouflage cups of ice and bubble gum, pretzel sticks and M&Ms.”

Ann, the records make clear, was a serious young woman. She participated in the Young Women’s Christian Association, served as the secretary in 1966 and as co-head of current issues in 1967 and helped plan the Y’s poverty symposium that year. She also worked with underprivileged children one summer in the Madison Street Project sponsored by four area churches and served on a committee to study religious life at the college. The yearbook showed that she was secretary of the Baptist Student Union.

So while I began to see that faith and service were a large part of who she was, I also knew she had her fun — she was in the yearbook as a member of the Gammas, one of the school spirit groups.

The most important information — Ann expressing herself — appeared in newspaper articles. She was quoted in 1968 when asked how she felt about the local high school band being banned from playing “Dixie,” the ode to the Confederacy: “It glorifies the old South and for some people this has unpleasant memories.”

After college, Ann went on to get her master’s degree in education from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) and worked as an early childhood education teacher and specialist in Maryland and Kentucky. She died in 2021, at 74.

To me, the most telling words Ann had to say about her life in college came years afterward. She was interviewed at length in a 2019 Sundial piece, “Looking Back: Desegregation Through the Lens of R-MWC.” In the interview, Ann described how some students and even faculty expressed hostility about Black students being on campus, but that she had an unforgettable experience.

“I met some wonderful people and formed lasting relationships,” she said. “I was involved in meaningful activities on campus and in the Lynchburg community with the YWCA. I was able to gain confidence through the respect I earned and the honors I achieved, e.g., Who’s Who. It was a profoundly pivotal period in my life.”

Thanks to these college records, we know so much more about how she came to be who she was.

—Wanda Whitney

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!