Digitization of the Thomas and Charity Rotch Documents

FAIN: PW-50564-10

Massillon Public Library (Massillon, OH 44646-8488)
Sherie Lynn Brown (Project Director: July 2009 to October 2013)

The transcription, cataloging, and digitization of approximately 9,000 pages of the papers of the family of Thomas Rotch (1767-1823), a Quaker businessman and farmer active in reform movements in New England and Ohio.

The Massillon Public Library requests $22,657 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete the digitization of more than 9000 pages of the Thomas and Charity Rotch documents. The result will be a free searchable online database of scanned images with corresponding explanatory material and transcriptions. This product will be included with other digitized content at www.massillonmemory.org. The Rotch collection contains personal and business correspondence, diaries, documents, accounts, ledgers, and daybooks of Thomas Rotch (1767-1823) and members of his family. Rotch was active in the whaling and shipping industry in Nantucket and New Bedford, MA, between 1790 and 1801; in farming, sheep-raising, and woolen manufacturing in Hartford, CT, between 1801 and 1811; and in the laying out and settling of the town of Kendal (now Massillon), OH, and the establishment of farming, sheep-raising, and manufacturing there between 1811 and 1823.