Navigating the APS American Indian Manuscript Supplements
If you are working with Native American historical documents, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia holds one of the most important manuscript collections in the country. A Supplement To A Guide To Manuscripts Relating To The American Indian In The Library Of The American Philosophical Society is the document you need to actually find your way through those shelves. The original guide came out in 1970, compiled by William N. Fenton. It catalogued the APS holdings on Indigenous peoples of the Americas at a time when the collection was already substantial but poorly organized for researchers. The supplement, published in 1985, caught up with acquisitions made over the intervening fifteen years. Without it, you would be missing entire groups of papers that had arrived at the Society well before anyone thought to list them.
A Supplement To A Guide To Manuscripts Relating To The American Indian In The Library Of The American Philosophical Society
The supplement covers roughly 350 additional manuscript groups. It includes entries for the papers of John H. Eddy, the William W. Tooker collection additions, material from the Jesuit Relations correspondence network, and a number of smaller donated collections that had previously had no finding aid at all. Each entry gives the donor, the dates of the material, the subjects covered, and a brief descriptive summary of what is inside. The format is straightforward. Entries are arranged alphabetically by collector or subject head, with cross-references pointing back to relevant entries in the original 1970 guide. There are no images, no maps, no reproductions. It is purely a descriptive catalogue. I ran into a real problem last year while tracking down correspondence between a Delaware missionary and a federal agent in the 1830s. The original guide listed a folder under "Delaware Indians" in the Garrison collection, but the supplement turned out to have reorganized and expanded that exact same series under a different accession number. The cross-reference system in the supplement is decent but not comprehensive. I spent about forty-five minutes looking in the wrong shelf mark before I noticed the note at the bottom of the 1970 guide entry that said "see supplement, item 147." That is the kind of thing that eats half a morning if you are not paying attention.
How to Use the Supplement in Practice
Start with the original 1970 guide. Read through the entries that seem relevant to your research topic. Then go to the supplement and look up the same subject headings. Many of the supplement entries are expansions of existing guide entries, not entirely new material. If you skip the original guide and go straight to the supplement, you will miss the context that tells you which earlier collection the new material connects to. The supplement also includes some entirely new collections that have no counterpart in the 1970 volume. These tend to be smaller donated papers -- a letter here, a diary fragment there -- that individually might seem trivial but can be essential for a specific family line or tribal affiliation you are tracing. I found a single page of a Shawnee interpreter's field notes in the supplement that resolved a date discrepancy I had been stuck on for three weeks.
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What the Supplement Does Not Cover
This is where people get tripped up. The supplement only goes through 1985. Any acquisitions made after that date are not listed anywhere in the published record. The APS has added significant material since then, including the Papers of James Mooney additions and various contemporary tribal records that were accessioned in the 1990s and 2000s. There is no printed guide for that later period. You have to check with the APS Rare Book and Manuscript Library directly, or search their online catalog, which is itself imperfectly updated. Another gap: the supplement does not cover the APS's printed book collection on American Indian topics. That is a separate catalog, and it is much larger. If your research requires both the manuscripts and the books, you need to use both finding aids independently. They overlap in subject coverage but are not integrated.
Accessing the Document
The supplement is available through the APS itself. You can request a copy through their reference service, and they will mail it to you. It is not in the public domain, so there is usually a small fee involved, typically around fifteen to twenty dollars for a photocopy of the full supplement. Some university libraries that hold the original 1970 guide also have the supplement on shelf, so it is worth checking your local research library first before paying for a copy. The APS online catalog has searchable entries for many of the individual manuscript collections described in the supplement, but the supplement itself as a standalone document is not digitized. If you need to cite a specific supplement entry in a paper, you will need either a physical copy or a photocopy from the APS. There is no digital PDF floating around the internet that is authoritative.
A Few Practical Notes
Call numbers in the supplement use the APS internal classification system, which is different from the Library of Congress system. When you go to the reading room, bring the supplement entry with you and write down the call number exactly as it appears. The APS staff can help you locate material, but they work best when you give them a specific box or folder number rather than a general subject description. The supplement references some collections by donor name only. If you are researching a specific tribe or individual and the supplement entry is vague, go back to the original guide and check the same donor's other entries. Sometimes the relevant material is filed under a different subject heading in the 1970 volume than you would expect. One more thing that trips people up: the supplement uses the spelling and terminology of its era. Headings like "Delawares" or "Five Civilized Tribes" appear in the original guide and carry over into the supplement. If you are searching by modern tribal names, you may not find the entry you are looking for. Use the historical terms, then verify with the APS reference staff whether those headings still correspond to current collection organization.
