Celebrating the New Year with Babies' Books

Dorothy Warren as a baby in the arms of her nurse

Traditionally the start of a new year is symbolized by a cute baby in diapers, top hat and a sash. So, this seems to be an opportune time for a blog post about babies' books: the commercially produced scrapbooks in which happy parents can record the details of their child's birth and early months of development. These often artfully illustrated scrapbooks record information like babies' weight and length at birth, the dates of milestone events such as their first tooth, and often include mementos like locks of  hair, baby's first shoes, and of course lots of photographs.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library in New York City recently added to its collection a couple of babies' books with a special connection to the Museum. The baby featured in both books was Miss Dorothy Warren, a fifth generation New Yorker born on 29 September 1905 to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Clarke Warren of South Lexington Avenue. The Warrens lived in the vicinity of Andrew Carnegie's East Side mansion (built in 1903) which would later became the building housing the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and Dorothy attended Spence School, located next door to the mansion. Little Dorothy's baby books include some darling photographs and details about the neighborhood, as well as sentimental items like valentines, greeting cards, and a pair of her dainty silk gloves.

Illustration by Maud Humphrey for Baby's Record

Miss Dorothy Warren grew up to become an artist, photographer and author who served in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II, and worked for several philanthropic organizations in New York City. She lived to the grand old age of 103, passing away on 21 January 2008. In particular, her New York Times death notice states, "She was active ... in the preservation of the Decorative Arts Collections which form the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design."

One of these scrapbooks, Baby's Record, published in New York by Frederick A. Stokes Co. and copyrighted 1898, is illustrated by Maud Humphrey (1868-1940), a highly successful commercial artist whose portraits of adorable babies and little children were sometimes modeled on her son, later known as the movie actor Humphrey Bogart.

Although the Smithsonian Libraries does not routinely collect babies' books (Miss Warren's connection with the Cooper-Hewitt making this a special case), the University of California at Los Angeles Biomedical Library’s History and Special Collections has more than 600 specimens and is still actively collecting them, since these books contain information with lots of potential interest for medical and social historians.

Humphrey, Maud. Baby's Record, with twelve illustrations in colour and thirty illustrations in black & white. New York : Frederick A. Stokes Co., publishers, c1898. With handwritten annotations, mounted photographs, and ephemera for Miss Dorothy Warren. Call number: HQ779 .H86 1898 CHMRB

Taylor, Ida Scott. Baby's Book, by Ida Scott Taylor and selections from Tennyson, George MacDonald, etc., illustrated by Frances Brundage. London : Raphael Tuck & Sons, [1902?]. With handwritten annotations and mounted photographs for Miss Dorothy Warren. Call number: HQ779 .T39 1902 CHMRB

Diane Shaw, Special Collections Cataloger
Smithsonian Libraries

Dolly at Standing Rock

Characteristic of archival collections, in October the National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center acquired a family photograph album. The gift of NMAI members Don Kritsch and Barbara Baker, the album was compiled by Mr. Kritsch’s great aunt Lizzie (1882-1977), formerly of Indianapolis, and contains photographs made from about 1918 to 1929 by her and various members of her immediate and extended family. The content of NMAI’s new album is in many ways typical of the genre—it includes depictions of men and women hard at work, enjoying their leisure, or fashionably appointed in a matching coat and hat and posed in the front gardens of their homes, and of their robust and (presumably) rosy cheeked children. In short, the photographs document a burgeoning German-American family. Why would NMAI accept an album of a German-American family into its collections? Simply stated, the Canisius family photograph album is as exceptional as it is typical.

Dolly's Students at Standing Rock Agency, Fort Yates, North Dakota. NMAI.AC.026.

A good number of the photographs naturally document the young adulthood of Aunt Lizzie and her husband Gus’s only child, Kathryn “Dolly” Canisius (1906-1943). Around 1926, Dolly apparently left her comfortable urban home to serve as an itinerant teacher-in-training in, what must have been for her, remote and distant places. Most significantly for NMAI, Standing Rock Agency in Fort Yates, North Dakota, was one of her posts. Dolly made photographs of her female and male Native students, both posed in groups and on picnics, non-student Natives congregated in town, street scenes, landscape views presumably made just outside of Fort Yates, Agency buildings, and the campus of the newly established Saint Bernard Mission School. On the versos of more than one hundred of the photographs she made, she conscientiously jotted down the names of her pupils or noted a place or building name. These she mailed home to Indianapolis, where her mother dutifully pasted them down onto eleven leaves of the family album. With this, Aunt Lizzie unconsciously but powerfully interleaved into her family’s history what was and remains for many Native Americans the trauma of U.S. Indian education policy.

The NMAI Archive Center and Don Kritsch look forward to scanning and sharing Dolly’s photographs with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Heather A. Shannon
Photo Archivist
NMAI Archive Center