This collection contains letters, diaries, and legal documents from the Hollister family who lived in Burr Oak, Michigan and Hamilton, Illinois during the mid-1800s and early 1900s.

Several letters are to and from Albert N. Hollister (1842-1915) and his mother Mary (Hollister) Shaw née Newcomb (1821-1905) and his younger sister (Mary) Lillian Hollister (1848-1866). The bulk of these letters were written during a long illness that claimed Lillian’s life in 1866 and the period afterwards when friends and family sent condolences. Letters also cover stops to visit family during a trip Albert took west to Denmark, Iowa and remarks about changes he noticed in the county that he attributed to the end of the Civil War.

Albert’s diaries contain snippets of day-to-day life on his farm as well as accounting of money, cost of food and supplies, and statics from his time spent as a grip man on the trains of Chicago.