Barbara Newhall Follett's life and letters
Barbara vanished from her apartment at 48 Kent Street, Brookline, Massachusetts on December 7, 1939. No one appears to know what happened to her after that date. Until her death about thirty years later, Barbara’s mother tried to find out what happened. Here’s a reply to her plea to an old seafaring acquaintance of theirs—Andrew Burt—who sailed with them in the Caribbean in 1928-29.
Thank you to Columbia University for the image.
One of Barbara’s earliest letters, written the day after her sixth birthday. From Harold McCurdy’s “Barbara”:
Her first important correspondent was an elderly Swedish gentleman who restored antiques. They met in his shop in Providence when she was four. She was carrying a stuffed toy rabbit who had lost an eye. Mr. Obert took sympathetic notice and paused in his work on two ancient clocks to repair the deficiency in her rabbit. She was impressed. Not long afterwards she composed a story in Mr. Oberg’s honor, and signed it with her full name.
With thanks to Columbia University for the images.
I apologize for the poor quality of the image (it’s from a faded 35mm slide from my mother’s collection), but for the Follett family this photograph is gold. (L-R): My grandfather Wilson Follett (1887-1963); his third wife (my grandmother) Margaret Whipple Follett (1907-1992); my mother Jane Follett (1935-2010); Grace Parker Follett (1911-1995; the only child of my grandfather’s first marriage to Grace Huntington Parker, who sadly died about three weeks after Grace was born); and Barbara Newhall Follett (1914-???), daughter of Wilson and his second wife, Helen Thomas Follett. The photograph was taken at the Follett home in Bradford, Vermont, on February 9, 1937, probably by Barbara’s husband Nickerson Rogers.
My second birthday was less formal.
The Farksolia/Farksoo folder in the Columbia University archives is very full but there are unfortunately important pages missing. Also, the archives do not include the card catalog entries of Farksoo>English and English>Farksoo words that Barbara describes in her correspondence.
Barbara wrote a brief manual on the structure of the language, and here are two versions of it: an early, very-nearly-complete one and a later, not-quite-so-complete one (pages 4 & 7 are missing). The last page in the gallery is a List of Grammatical Words and Symbols.… Read more