The copyright and other intellectual property rights in the Sibley-Watson
Digital Archive are owned by their respective source repositories. These
materials are available free of charge subject to the following
restrictions:
Transcription / photograph
provided by and copyright © University of Rochester River Campus
Libraries. Original version available for viewing and download
at http://library.rochester.edu.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
The License was added on January 1, 2015.
The Sibley and Watson families arrived in Rochester, New York in the early part of the nineteenth century, coming from Western Massachusetts as part of the pioneering migration west after the War of 1812. Hiram Sibley and Don Alonzo Watson, considered the founding organizers of Western Union, were the fathers of Emily Sibley Watson (1855-1945) and James Sibley Watson, Sr. (1860-1951), who grew up in Rochester and married each other in 1891. Mrs. Watson was influential in the cultural life of Rochester, having founded the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester and the Hochstein School of Music and Dance. Due to the privileged circumstances of Emily Sibley Watson’s birth, she traveled widely from an early age and cultivated a taste for the arts that was balanced by a family commitment to philanthropy and community service. Letters, diaries, photographs, and related documents chronicle her nine decades and are housed primarily in repositories in Rochester, notably the University of Rochester and George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. The Sibley-Watson Digital Archive project unites long-separated collections of family papers that shine a spotlight on Rochester from 1833 through the 1970s and illuminate Emily Sibley Watson’s life. In addition to connecting her public roles as the daughter of a captain of industry and the mother of James Sibley Watson, Jr., pioneer of 20th century modernism, Mrs. Watson’s papers detail the personal experiences, concerns, and spheres of influence of a woman deeply rooted in service to family and community.
Original line breaks, punctuation, abbreviations and spelling have been preserved in the transcriptions and underlining and strikethroughs have been encoded. Marginalia associated with a photograph or other ephemera has been transcribed and associated with that object. Other marginalia is tagged "caption" at the beginning of the relevant date's entry. Words or phrases deemed indecipherable have been noted as "illegible." Nontextual original content, e.g. drawings and diagrams, have been noted as such. Images of the original diary pages are provided to show the creator’s original page layout and placement of additions.
In the context of this project, private URIs with the prefix "psn" point to
In the context of this project, private URIs with the prefix "psn" point to
In the context of this project, private URIs with the prefix "psn" point to