Mary A. Forman papers

The collection consists mainly of letters and questionnaires written between 1904-1908 on the topic of mid-19th-century Los Angeles. Most of the questionnaires, composed by Mary A. Forman, include a correspondent's answers, and most of the letters were written to Forman in response to her questionnaires or other inquiries. Forman presumably conducted the correspondence as a result of her involvement in the Auld Lang Syne Club. There are also a few other documents that she probably acquired as part of her research, including a small number of letters written by Southerners (possibly relatives of A. J. King) during the Civil War and a few 19th-century California letters, most of them written in Spanish.

The purpose of most of Mary Forman's inquiries was to obtain very specific details or confirmation of details of Los Angeles history, from what kind of roof a certain house had to which band of Apaches killed a certain man. Because of this, the responses cover a markedly wide range of topics, and the number of authors and other people involved is unusually large for a collection of this size. General topics addressed in the documents include Los Angeles history, California state and local government, crime, medicine, architecture, education, land allotment, churches, agriculture, Indians, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Photocopies of photographs and a brief biography of Mary A. and Charles Forman, compiled by John Steven McGroaty in Los Angeles: From the Mountains to the Sea, published in 1921, can be requested with the paper versin of this finding aid.