Scope and Content Note
The papers of Abel Doysié (1886-1973) span the years 1910-1967, with the bulk of the material dating between 1920 and 1962. The papers deal almost exclusively with his professional life as a researcher and translator and are arranged into the following series: General Correspondence and Addition .
The General Correspondence contains the bulk of the papers and consists largely of Doysié's correspondence and research notes with scholars, universities, libraries, and institutions here and abroad for whom Doysié did historical and genealogical research after his work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Library of Congress ended in 1936. There is also a small amount of printed material such as articles, newspaper clippings, and pamphlets dealing with the activities and organizations of his various correspondents enclosed with incoming letters. Included also is a small group of miscellaneous family material which includes a photograph of Doysié, a song of his composition, and several early letters from relatives.
Abel Doysié began his long association with American scholarship in 1908 when he was hired by Waldo Gifford Leland, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's representative in Paris as his research assistant. He continued to work for the Carnegie Institution, listing and describing documents for the preparation of a guide to French materials relating to American history in Parisian libraries and archives until his services were terminated in 1922. Volume I of the Guide to Materials for American History in the Libraries and Archives of Paris was published in 1932 and Volume II in 1943. In 1913 the Library of Congress inaugurated its foreign copying program, using Leland's and Doysié's notes as guides in its systematic transcriptions of French documents pertaining to America. Leland was authorized to engage Doysié to supervise the transcription and later photocopying of these documents. There is not a great deal of correspondence with either the Carnegie Institution of Washington or the Library of Congress in the papers, but there are many letters from Leland for the years from 1910 to 1961 which reflect Doysié's life and work during that period.
Correspondents include James Truslow Adams, Henry Putney Beers, Whitfield J. Bell, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Julian P. Boyd, William L. Clements, Worthington Chauncey Ford, J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Coleman Sellers, Lothrop Stoddard, James Benjamin Wilbur, and Carter Godwin Woodson. Institutions represented in the correspondence include the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library in Wilmington, Delaware, the Illinois Historical Survey of the University of Illinois, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
It was in the field of American colonial history that Doysié's research was concentrated. Indeed, he developed such familiarity with French source materials that in 1938 he was invited to give a series of lectures in New York on the American War of Independence. He later arranged the historical section of the French exhibit at the New York World's Fair (1939-1940), and upon his return to Paris prepared a George Washington exhibit at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
The Addition is comprised largely of research notes with a small amount of correspondence.