Steve Ely

Print Biography Resources

I had some familiarity with print biographical resources while at Pitt but perhaps not intimately or in profound depth.  Even what I did know has grown a little rusty as time has passed while my attention was elsewhere.  So I’m glad for the recent occasion to work with them a bit more here after my curiosity was provoked about a particular historical figure.

A book I read recently mentioned the American Colonization Society as founding Liberia and Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington, founding the American Colonization Society.   My reaction went something like this: George Washington’s nephew founded the group that founded Liberia?  George Washington had a nephew?  George Washington’s nephew was named “Bushrod”?  Anyone’s ever had the first name “Bushrod”?

So I plugged his name into the Biography and Genealogy Master Index and found he’s included in about 31 sources.   We haven’t got all of them at Cornette, but we do have a number of them.  I’m happy for the chance to figure them out a bit more.  Scrutiny of a couple of them follows below in the full entry.

The Dictionary of American Biography has an interesting setup.  It was originally published in twenty volumes between 1927 and 1937, with entries arranged alphabetically throughout the entire set (e.g. the Washingtons are in volume 19), but the edition we have was published in 1958 in ten volumes, plus the index.  (There were additional supplements published for later years, of course, so it doesn’t only cover lives through 1927.)  The original scheme was still kept intact, though, in the 1958 edition, despite the fewer physical volumes.  The original volumes 1 and 2 became parts 1 and 2 in the new volume 1 and the original volumes 19 and 20, for instance, are parts 1 and 2 in the new volume 20.

The peculiar thing is the way the index identifies where to find a given entry.  It keeps the original volume references, so that Bushrod Washington is listed as being in volume 19, page 508.  This can be disorienting at the first encounter.  Not knowing the publishing history and resultant format, it’s a little confusing to be directed to a page in volume 19 and see that there are only ten volumes on the shelf.

Fortunately, that doesn’t tend to interfere with finding someone in the original edition.  The spines are all labeled with the alphabetical range of the names.  So Volume Ten, with Troye to Zunser, is the obvious home of Bushrod Washington.

With such an alphabetic arrangement, what is the need for the index?  Well, I do find the alphabetically arranged section of the index for subjects of biographies a little redundant, in fact.  The index does have other handy features, though.  Biography subjects are also sorted by contributors [authors of biographical articles], birthplaces, schools and colleges, and occupations.  There is also an index of topics covered in various entries.  For instance, the abolition movement is a heading with a list of all the pages where appear definite statements and discussions of it.

Bushrod Washington gets a little more than a page, which isn’t bad, but not quite as good as Booker T. Washington’s two-plus pages immediately before or the 18 or so pages immediately thereafter for our first president.

Bushrod’s also included in Who Was Who in America.  Who’s Who in America, providing short biographies of notable living Americans, was first published at the end of the nineteenth century.   In 1968, those persons included in it who had since died were compiled into four retrospective volumes called Who Was Who in America.  (A tiny bit morbid, really.  It could be subtitled “Face It, Folks.  You’re All Gonna Die.”)

Along with those four volumes was a Historical Volume, for dead Americans (and foreigners contributing notably to our history) from 1607 through 1896.  Its preface notes that it makes the series chronologically complete.  It also says the work has “virtual necessity to reference users.”  I guess the editors here didn’t think much of the Dictionary of American Biography.

Perhaps, though, it may have been of such necessity because of subjects included who didn’t make the cut in the Dictionary of American Biography.  Apparently the five volumes published in 1968 include, as the preface excitedly puts it, “a matchlessly comprehensive 115,000 names!”

Basically, Who Was Who seems a good thing to have when a given person isn’t covered somewhere else, but not so necessary if that person is in the Dictionary of American Biography.  The value of such things as the American National Biography and the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography will have to wait for another night.