The Soule Family Papers

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Soule Family Collection Review
The collection that I decided to research was the Soule Family papers. In this collection the context was a lot to do with the railroad that George worked for. A popular topic that was discussed in a lot of the family’s papers was the weather. In the writings of George and Ada, there were a lot of talk about snow, and how cold it was while they were living in Grand Forks and Harvey. George particularly talked about on the railroad that there would be enough snow piled up that it would make the trains get stuck. Ada’s writings were mostly about day-to-day tasks like chores, homework, and again how cold the weather was in North Dakota during February and the winter months. The Soule family collection captured the life of North Dakota in the late 1890s like a picture, the severe weather, and the hardships of money. North Dakota is a very hard working state and is comfortably ordinary place to live and that’s what this collection captured best.
The collection that I researched was called the Soule Family Papers, and the author was Matthew Soule, whom collected all the family papers. The collection of the Soule Family papers is being housed at the NDSU archive. Matthew Soule did a great job of collecting important documents, and ledgers. The contents of this source was a lot of letters back and forth between Matthew Soule and Archivists, then there were a few ledgers including George’s and Amose’s. Then there were some hand written letters from George Soule’s daughters; Ada and Ruth. All these are very important documents to the whole collection because they really paint a picture to how life really was back then and different point of views of family members. The intended audience for the diary of Ada...

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...iate the collection, because for the most part it was pretty basic things that were in the diaries and ledgers. Then to know that this was an actual family, and that they were struggling was eye opening.
North Dakota is very hard working state, and it is comfortably ordinary, as I stated above this collection captured this very well. This family didn’t do anything that will stand in history forever and that is will be forever common knowledge. They were a common family in North Dakota that most of us are familiar with the lifestyle. I would say that if most families had papers and diaries dating back to when this family started a lot of it would be very similar with slight differences. North Dakota is very ordinary place to live, nothing really all that exciting happens all to often but the people here today and back then I would say were very comfortable with it.

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