Scope and Content Note
The papers of the Hayes, Hollister, and Kelman families span the years 1826-2012, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 2010. They primarily relate to two generations of American Presbyterian missionaries and educators in China. W. M. (Watson MacMillan Hayes) (1857-1944) and his wife, Margaret Young Hayes (1857-1949), lived and worked in China from 1882 to 1944. Their son, John David Hayes (1888-1957) and his wife, Barbara Monteath Kelman Hayes (1893-1929), served in China in the period 1917-1952. W. M. and Margaret Young Hayes had three children, John David, Irene, and Ernest. Irene died in childhood. John David and Barbara Monteath Kelman Hayes had five children, Margaret, Elinor, Janet, Barbara, and John. All but one of the children were born in China and attended college in the United States. Additional material relates to John and Barbara Hayes's eldest daughter, Margaret Hayes Hollister (1917- ), and Barbara Hayes's father, John Kelman (1864-1929), a Scottish clergyman.. The papers are grouped by type of material into diaries and journals, correspondence, miscellany, and books. They are primarily written in English, although some Chinese is present.
Among the diaries and journals are a diary kept by W. M. Hayes while he was interned by the Japanese in the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Center in Shandong Sheng (Shantung Province) from 1943 until his death there in 1944 and his granddaughter, Barbara Hayes's (later Barbara Hayes Ambler) account of her internment in the Philippines from 1941-1943. A journal written by Margaret Hayes (later Margaret Hayes Hollister) provides an account of the year she spent as a student at Yanjing da xue (Yenching University) in Peking, China. Barbara Monteath Kelman Hayes's pocket diaries relate largely to her later years in the United States. A journal kept by her father, John Kelman, describes his voyage from Australia on the steamship Oroya in 1888. Two of these diaries are supplemented by lectures filed in the miscellany section of the papers. A lecture by John Kelman details his experiences in Australia in 1888 and one by Barbara Hayes Ambler recounts her internment experience during World War II.
A correspondence section is comprised primarily of family letters. They are particularly numerous from the period 1910 through the 1950s. Many of the letters were written by W. M. Hayes and Margaret Young Hayes, and a large portion of these were written to their son, John David. There are holes in some letters from when stamps were removed from the envelopes. As a result, some of the text is missing. W. M. Hayes also wrote to his mother and sisters in Pennsylvania and sent letters to the Presbyterian Church of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. These letters are filled with details of their life and work and comment on events such as the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, an outbreak of plague in 1911, the Chinese Revolution in 1911-1912, and the second Sino-Japanese War starting in 1937. There is also a large group of letters written by Barbara Monteath Kelman Hayes to members of her family in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the oldest letters are those written by W. M. Hayes's father, David Hayes, while he was a soldier in the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteers during the Civil War. He was killed in 1865 while on picket duty near Petersburg, Virginia.
The miscellany includes biographical information on family members, sermons by John Kelman, and personal files comprised of material belonging to or relating to specific individuals. Among the items in John David Hayes's personal file are school records from China, memorabilia from his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and a typescript of the "confessions" he wrote while imprisioned by Chinese Communists. The personal file for his daughter, Margaret Hayes Hollister, chronicles her life and work as a social worker in Washington, D.C. Margaret Hayes Hollister's memoir, Inheriting China, describes her experiences growing up in China and includes accounts of the lives of her parents and grandparents. A memoir written by her sister, Barbara Hayes Ambler, includes details of her voyage on the repatriation ship the Gripsholm as part of a Japanese-American civilian prisoner exchange during World War II. Also included is Barbara Monteath Kelman Hayes's account of the work of her husband, John David Hayes. A file of research for a proposed documentary on W. M. Hayes and John D. Hayes contains copies of State Department documents relating to the latter's imprisonment by Communists from October 1951 to September 1952.
A group of books with religious themes published by John Kelman between 1903 and 1924 includes two, Salted with Fire(1915) and The War and Preaching (1919), that relate to World War I, when Kelman served as a chaplain in the British Territorial Army.