The Williams-Chambers-Seelye-Franck Papers ("The Franck Papers")

The Williams-Chambers-Seelye-Franck Family Papers (“the Franck Papers”) represent the activities of an extended family beginning with William Frederic Williams (1818-1871) and his wife Sarah Pond Williams (1823-1854) through their great-grandchildren, especially the children of Kate and Laurens Seelye. The following biographical sketches describe family members most represented or referred to in the Franck Papers.

The earliest figure to appear in the Franck Papers is William Frederic Williams -- known as Frederic -- who was the son of William and Sophia Wells Williams, of Utica, New York. One of sixteen children (by his father’s two wives), Frederic was born on January 11, 1818. He entered Yale College in 1837 but had to leave on account of illness in the summer of 1838. Frederic worked, including as an engineer, until autumn of 1844, when he entered the Auburn Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. He graduated in 1847, but by that time he had already been corresponding with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions about becoming a missionary. In order to obtain some preaching experience, he served temporarily at the First Presbyterian Church in Rome, New York. There, probably in late 1847, he met Sarah Amelia Pond, a teacher and the daughter of Julius and Ann Crary Pond. They were engaged by May of 1848 and married in August of that year.

Sarah and Frederick sailed for the Syria Mission in January, 1849. They located first in Beirut, then briefly outside Beirut, and in early 1851, after the birth of their daughter Cornelia, the couple moved to Mosul. Frederic worked in Mosul until 1859, when he was sent to the station at Mardin. By this time his first two wives – Sarah and Harriet – had died, Sarah in 1854, and Harriet in 1856. Frederic Williams remained a member of the mission station in Mardin until his death in 1871, but he also spent time at the station in Harpoot, a few hundred miles from Mardin. It was there that he met his fourth wife, Clarissa Celinda (known as Kate) Pond, a distant cousin of his first wife. A Mount Holyoke Female Seminary graduate, Kate was a teacher at the girls’ school in Harpoot.

The bulk of papers specifically by or about Frederic and Sarah Williams are in the earlier gift of the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Papers. The Franck Papers contain only a few papers and photographs specifically related to them, but as the foundational figures for the family they’re important to the context of the Frank Papers. In large measure, the history of the family as told in the collections turns on that 1849 voyage to Syria.

Frederic and Sarah had three children, all born in the Middle East: Talcott, born on July 20, 1849; Cornelia Pond, born on December 3, 1850, and Henry Dwight, born in February 1854. Talcott, who was reading Shakespeare as well as the Koran in Arabic at age 10, became a prominent journalist and educator; his papers are found in the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Papers as well as in his own Talcott Williams (AC 1873) Papers.

Henry Dwight Williams – known as Dwight – was taken by his widowed father to live with his aunt Sophia Williams Gardner, who subsequently adopted Dwight against his father’s wishes. Dwight died in 1883 while studying at Harvard University. His memorial in Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica, New York lists him as Henry D. Gardner. There is no information directly about him in the Franck Papers, and what little documentation exists is in the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Papers and the Blaisdell Papers.

After the deaths of their mother and the first two (Harriet and Caroline) of three stepmothers, Cornelia and Talcott traveled to the United States for schooling in the spring of 1866. Cornelia attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, graduating in 1872. In 1879 she returned to Turkey to join stepmother Kate Pond Williams in teaching at the Home School in Scutari. In 1884, she married William Nesbitt Chambers (usually known as Nesbitt or W. Nesbitt Chambers), a young widower who was a missionary at Erzerum. The couple worked in Erzerum until 1899, and all four of their children were born there. In 1899 they were posted in Adana, where they remained until 1916. The bulk of information about Cornelia and Nesbitt Chambers is located in the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Family Papers and the Blaisdell Papers; in the Franck Papers they are represented in the first series with a modest number of documents and photographs.

The chief strength of the Franck Papers lies in the documents relating to the family life of Frederic and Sarah’s granddaughter, and Cornelia and Nesbitt’s daughter, Kate Ethel Chambers, and her husband, Laurens Hickok Seelye (AC 1911).

Kate Ethel Chambers (1889-1973) was one of four children of Cornelia Pond Williams and William Nesbitt Chambers, and one of two who survived to adulthood. Her brothers Ralph and Talcott both died early, Ralph shortly before his third birthday and Talcott in a fall in the Swiss Alps when he was 15. Kate and her sister Dorothea Nesbitt Chambers attended Bryn Mawr, Kate graduating in 1911 and Dorothea in 1919, and both attended Columbia University, Kate receiving her Ph.D. in 1919 and Dorothea an M.A. in 1920. The bulk of Dorothea’s papers are in the Blaisdell Papers and the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Family Papers.

Laurens Hickok Seelye was born in Ohio in 1899. The Franck Papers include a step sideways to the Seelye and Clark lines of his family, including photographs and correspondence to, from, and about his father William James Seelye (AC 1879) (a professor of German and Greek, and later a clergyman); his mother Mary Alice Clarke (known as Alice) and her Clarke and Brown parents; and many of the cousins on both sides. A key relationship in this group is that of Laurens Seelye and his cousin Julius Seelye Bixler (AC 1916): the two were close all their lives, and cousin Julius no doubt took the place in Laurens’ heart of his younger brother Julius, who died while at military training during World War I. Additional papers about the Seelye and Bixler families may be found in the Julius Hawley Seelye (AC 1849) Family Papers, the William James (1797-1868) Family Papers and Sermons, and the Laurens Perseus Hickok Papers, as well as in biographical files for the many Amherst College graduates from these families. Laurens Seelye graduated from Columbia University in 1915, and his first work was as a pastor in the Stanley Congregational Church in Chatham, New Jersey. He married Kate Seelye in the fall of 1915. During World War I, Laurens served briefly in the Army Y.M.C.A. and then as chaplain at Fort Greble in Rhode Island. In March 1919 the Seelyes sailed to Beirut where Laurens took up a position teaching philosophy and psychology at the Syrian Protestant College, later renamed the American University of Beirut. Kate was on the faculty of the American Junior College for Girls in Beirut. In the 1920s the family built a home they called Bushy Rock, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. There are a few photographs of the home in the Franck Papers. The elderly Chambers couple eventually moved in with them. Kate and Laurens left Beirut in 1933 and Laurens took temporary faculty positions at Smith College and Bennington College. From 1935-1940 he served as President of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. In 1942 the Seelyes returned to the Middle East for a 14-year residence, this time in Istanbul, where Laurens taught philosophy at Robert College and the American College for Girls, while Kate taught American literature and English at the latter institution. They returned to the United States permanently in 1957. Laurens continued to teach in retirement, but illness caught up with him in 1959. He died in August 1960. Kate survived him by a dozen years, during which time she remained active in work she loved and continued to be the matriarch of a family now containing several grandchildren.

Kate and Laurens had five children: Dorothea (1917-1988); Mary-Averett (1919-2013); Talcott (1922-2006), Muriel (1925-2009), and Katherine (1930-1934). The Franck Papers contain personal and professional material for all the children except Katherine, who died in childhood.

Eldest daughter Dorothea Chambers Seelye (m. Franck) was born in Chatham, New Jersey, but she spent most of her formative years in Beirut. Following in her mother and aunt’s steps, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. During World War II she served in Egypt in the Office of Strategic Services, where she used her language skills to translate for the Allies. The focus of her life’s work was to promote understanding of the Middle East, and to that end she coordinated cultural exchange programs for the Department of State; worked for the Washington, D.C. offices of the American Friends of the Middle East; helped organize the Middle East Network in Syracuse, New York, and later edited the Americans for Justice in the Middle East News (AJME News). She was also a writer and editor, including for the “Christian Science Monitor.” Her manuscript “Yankees from New York to the Garden of Eden” (a copy is in the Williams-Chambers-Seelye Papers) is a valuable resource for her family’s history in the Middle East as it both transcribes early family letters and describes them in the context of time and place. In addition, Franck wrote two children’s books, “The Cat Who Loved Bach” and “Mother Adz.” She was also a peace activist and was on the board of the Dunbar Center in Syracuse, New York. Dorothea married Professor Peter Goswyn Franck in June, 1940. They had two daughters, Karen and Marianne.

Peter Goswyn Franck was born in Berlin in 1913. He earned law degrees from the University of Berlin (1936) and the University of Basel (1938). In 1954, responding to a shift in his interests and professional positions, he earned an Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He then worked as a consultant for private and government entities in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. He was a professor of economics at Robert College between 1956 and 1965. In 1966 he joined the faculty of Syracuse University where he taught international trade and investment. He also served as Director of the Business Research Center there. After his retirement in 1980, he taught at the American University of Beirut and then at the University of Sfax in Tunisia. He was an expert in Islamic banking and a United Nations adviser in Syria. Peter Franck died at his home in Virginia in 1989.

Mary-Averett, the second child of Laurens and Kate Seelye, was also born in New Jersey, but the family moved to Beirut (then in Syria) when she was only a few months old. She attended the American Community School in Beirut and then – because her family had moved back to the United States -- the Mary Burnham School in Northampton, Massachusetts. Mary-Averett graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1940. By this time it was clear that theater and dance would be her career. She continued her education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she took an M.A. in 1944. Her long career is well documented in Series 8, and a post for the Consecrated Eminence blog features photographs from various stages of her life: https://consecratedeminence.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/a-dancer-in-the-family-mary-averett-seelye/ . Seelye died in 2013 at the age of 94.

Laurens and Kate’s son Talcott Williams Seelye was born in Beirut. His first schooling was in the American Community School, followed by Canton High School in New York and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He entered Amherst College as a member of the Class of 1944 but interrupted college to serve in the army. He returned to Amherst and graduated in 1947, taught at Deerfield Academy for a year and then, in 1948, entered the Foreign Service. He was a career diplomat, serving in Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Syria. His long career and his many additional activities were detailed in his obituary (he died June, 2006) in the October 2006 issue of the “Foreign Service Journal” – a copy of the obituary is in his Archives and Special Collections biographical file. In 1950 Seelye married Joan Hazeltine; the couple had four children: Lauren, Ammanda, Talcott (AC 1978), and Kate (AC 1984). The bulk of material about Talcott Seelye is in the Talcott W. Seelye (AC 1944) Family Papers.

Muriel Clarke Seelye (m. Heineman) was born in Beirut in 1925. Muriel’s early school years were spent at the American Community School in Beirut. She was a 1947 Bennington College graduate with a degree in drama. After World War II, Heineman worked with refugee children in France and Spain as well as with the American Friends Service Committee. In 1957 she earned an M.A. at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and then taught English at the Mount Vernon Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She also worked for the United States Information Agency and the National Geographic Society. Heineman performed with the Theatre Lobby, the group her sister Mary-Averett had co-founded; Muriel is visible in some of the photographs in Series 8. She married architect Paul Turner Heineman in 1961 and the couple moved to Baltimore, where they raised two sons. From 1971 to 2004 Muriel taught literature and drama at Villa Julie College (Stevenson University). She died in 2009. Additional materials about the Seelyes of this generation may be found in the Williams-Chambers Seelye Family Papers and the Talcott Williams (AC 1944) Family Papers.