Researching Personal Narratives at NYPL: Type

Personal narratives often revolve around a theme or subject, or the context of an experience. One of the most common is a trade or profession. For example, the experiences of Black female servicewomen in the Gulf Wars; a New York cop in the gaslight era;  recounting celebrity deaths by the Coroner for Los Angeles; or a postwar Southwest oil worker. If your research involves, directly or indirectly, what it was like for a professional of a certain type, fish around for a potential first-person narrative that gives an insider's account of life in such a trade, career, occupation, vocation, or profession, including military narratives, which are abundant, and often arranged by the particular conflict:, or regiment, or both:

• United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Personal narratives
• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives.
• Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Personal narratives, American
• United States -- Army -- South Carolina Volunteers, 1st (1862-1864) -- Biography
• Japanese eyes, American heart : personal reflections of Hawaii's World War II Nisei soldiers

One of the most common subjects at the reference desk is researching what life was like in a certain place at a certain time. The more local, granular, and focused, the more your subject time/place gains dimension. And, besides the subject at hand, you will likely be curious about language, speech patterns, figures of speech, slang, diction, and other details indicating the way people wrote and spoke at a certain time in history. Three considerations:

Series. Scholarly editions are sometimes published based on the collation and transcription of primary source material. For example, Original Narratives of Early American History, 18 volumes published between 1906 and 1917 covering numerous U.S. locales and date ranges. A keyword search in the catalog using the exact phrase in quotes results in a comprehensive list of items in this series, which includes a wide range of subjects, from the Southwest to New Netherland, sea exploration to witchcraft.

Scope. Sometimes, the "place" might be as confined as an institution, like a prison or hospital, and the "time" a short stint, like Ward N-1, a 1955 memoir of five days spent in the "alcoholic ward" of Bellevue Hospital. The scope might also cover decades and span multiple locales at different times. Your research purposes will determine the most accurate framework of time and place.   

Cross-reference. Pair your personal narrative resources with local history research - see our Guide to Neighborhood Research for a primer on the resources and research methods that bring to life a slice of life back in the day: city directories, census schedules, image collections, etc. Cross-referencing is often the absolute key to sound research, and will support personal narratives as advanced materials in your research process.

For American post-colonial history, the archetype of personal narratives are the Journals of Lewis and Clark, which cover the odyssey westward from St. Louis to explore the lands of the Louisiana Purchase between 1804 and 1806. Frontier memoirs, diaries, etc. are numerous; explorations of the American West suggest the realities of the United States in its infancy. Another copious genre are maritime narratives, accounts of life at sea, often embellished. But the experience of one going from point A to point B is a classic framework for these types of narratives, made much more interesting by the context of the narrator.

A few sample subject headings to get the gist of finding these types of titles:

• Seafaring Life -- History
• Voyages and Travel
• Explorers -- West (U.S.) -- Diaries
• [ETHNICITY]- American -- Biography; for example, Ukrainian Americans -- Biography.
• Immigrants -- United States -- Biography
• Immigrants' writings, American

New York City worships the image of itself in movies and TV, but for much longer in its 400 year history, it was obsessed with itself in print. City voices are boundless: the oppressed and the powerful, the one-month sublet resident and the life-long rent-control uptowner. New York personal narratives usually crossover into certain types, like the occupational memoir (hospital worker in the Civil War and Reconstruction era NYC, a career maitre d', a 19th century cart man), or because of the city's mega multiethnicity, the experience of first generation immigrants.

Some go-to search terms and subject headings to get you started:

• Search Terms. Simply springboard into related collections by using the terms "New York memoir" to search research catalog.
• More Terms. Likewise, "New York reminiscence" or "immigrant account" or any of the terms indicated under the "Text" tab in the "Format" section. In particular, "reminiscence" was a popular term in the 19th century to indicate someone reflecting on bygone times; there is a wealth of quantum perspective and history when a New Yorker in 1860 talks about the old days like someone in the mid-2000s lamenting 1960s Fun City.
• New York (N.Y.) -- History -- Sources. This is adjacent to the tab "Bibliographies, Indexes, and Studies" under the "Subject Headings" section.
• Taxicab drivers -- New York (State) -- New York. Isn't this the most iconic New York City profession, other than local history and genealogy librarian at NYPL? Someone who not only sees the scope of the city in a way, physically, which no other job demands, but encounters an infinity of personalities, both local and out-of-town.
• Police -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography. A recurring question at the reference desk involves patrons researching former police officers, or a crime that took place decades ago. Because NYPD records can either be tough to access, or nonexistent, autobiographical materials can prove a useful alternative.

And some notable sample titles in particular:

• Hone, Philip, 1780-1851 -- Diaries. The diary of Philip Hone, explains novelist Louis Auchincloss, "is important to historians for its picture of New York manners and leaders, but one of its chief delights lies in its reflection of the diarist himself: an early 19th century gentleman of the best sort, with all of his undoubted virtues and all of his equally undoubted prejudices."  
• Strong, George Templeton, 1820-1875 -- Diaries. These volumes were quoted from extensively through the Ken Burns New York documentary.
• Elizabeth DeHardt Bleecker. Over 400 pages between 1799 and 1806 by a woman in the prime of her youth in early America NYC; "neither the diary of an upper-echelon member of the political elite, nor of an ordinary New Yorker... Bleecker was a well-to-do woman, a woman of leisure; she did not have to work... her position afforded her a broad view of New York and the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century." The entirety of the diary is digitized at NYPL Digital Collections.
• Appendix containing olden time researches & reminiscences of New York City (1830). Written when Manhattan had a population of "180,000 souls," and interweaves history with recollection.
• New York diaries, 1609 to 2009 / Teresa Carpenter. unique anthology that cuts and pastes excerpts from dozens of first-person NYC narratives and assembles each entry into chronological order, month by month within each year. It may be more of an impressionistic literary experiment than research resource, but the timeline aspect casts an interesting synthesis on the identity of the city. For example, entries for September 11 begin with the 1609 journal of Robert Juet, a crewmember on the Half Moon captained by Henry Hudson: "Faire and very hot weather." Then a 1950 diary excerpt by pioneer avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas; and concluding with a post on the World Trade Center terrorist attacks by a forgotten blogger called Chad the Minx.    
• Resident alien: the New York diaries / Quentin Crisp (1996). Practically everything written by the East Village icon in cocked fedora and flowing neck scarf is a personal narrative because of his highly unique voice, style, and sensibility.