Guide to the Leila G. Kirtland Papers
Open for research.
Nitrate negatives sequestered. Access to nitrate negatives will be provided through digital surrogates.
Box 1, folder 12, Photograph album, 1910s is fragile.
Leila Griffing Kirtland, a Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) educational missionary to Japan, was born in 1877 in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at the Clara Conway Institute, a Memphis girls’ school. She studied music in New York, and arrived in Japan in the autumn of 1910 to teach kindergarten alongside Mary Fletcher Smythe at Kinjo Gakuin, a school for girls in Nagoya.
Kirtland spent the next 21 years at Kinjo, retiring in 1932. Upon retirement from the school, Kirtland undertook evangelistic work in Marugame. She wrote two memoirs of female missionaries to Japan: "My Japanese Journal," under the pseudonym Laura Gordon Keith, an account of the fictional Eleanor Craven; and "Lumpy," a biography of Estelle Lumpkin.
Collection consists predominantly of photographic material either created or collected by Kirtland; prints, albums and negatives span 1857 to 1952. Few photographs are identified. The bulk of the loose photographic prints depict Kirtland’s family and friends. Among the four photograph albums are "The Briar Patch," dated 1926 to 1931, which includes photographs of the resort Karuizawa in Nagano prefecture, and a farewell album containing photographs and notes from Kirtland’s friends, compiled between 1939 and 1940.
A large collection of nitrate negatives in Box 2 is sequestered from Box 1. These include images of the kindergarten at either Marugame or Nagoya, negatives of prints in the "Briar Patch" photograph album, and images of Kinjo Gakuin
The collection is arranged as follows:
SERIES I: WRITINGS AND CLIPPINGS, 1915-1954
SERIES II: PHOTOGRAPHS, 1857-1952
See also Vernon A. Crawford Papers, RG 448; Langdon Cheves McCord Smythe and Mary Fletcher Smythe Papers, RG 467.
Received from PCUS General Executive Board warehouse, 1976.
Collection processed and guide prepared in 2012 by David Staniunas, Records Archivist and Sue Althouse, Volunteer.
Leila G. Kirtland Papers, RG 481, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
| Box | Folder | Description | |
| 1 | 1 | Guide to Record Group 481 | |
| SERIES I: WRITINGS AND CLIPPINGS, 1915-1953 | |||
| 1 | 2 | Annotated Bible study index, 1942 | |
| 1 | 3 | Sermon notes, speech outlines, 1941-1953 | |
| 1 | 4 | Inspirational clippings, 1936-1954 | |
| 1 | 5 | News clippings, 1943-1953 | |
| 1 | 6 | Clippings, 1915 and undated | |
| 1 | 7 | Explication of content of embroidered emblem by Nobuo Watanabe, 1913 | |
| SERIES II: PHOTOGRAPHS, 1857-1952 | |||
| 1 | 8 | Photographs--Japan, 1933-1952 | |
| 1 | 9 | Photographs--Personal, 1857-1880s | |
| 1 | 10 | Photographs--Personal, 1890s-1924 | |
| 1 | 11 | Photographs--Personal, 1932-1948 | |
| 1 | 12 | Photograph album, 1910s | |
| 1 | 13 | Photograph album, 1910s-1937 | |
| 1 | 14 | Photograph album, “The Briar Patch,” 1926-1931 | |
| 1 | 15 | Photograph album, 1939-1940 | |
| 1 | 16 | Index to nitrate negatives 1-100 removed from negative album, 1910s-1920s | |
| 2 | Nitrate negatives, 1910s-1940s [RESTRICTED] |