Catawba materials, James M. Crawford Papers
Culture:
Date: 1941 and undated
Contributor: Crawford, James M. (James Mack), 1925-1989 | McDavid, Raven Ioor
Subject: Linguistics | Anthropology | Ethnography | Kinship | Genealogy | Folklore | Animals--Folklore
Type: Text
Genre: Notes | Notebooks | Field notes | Stories | Correspondence | Stories | Grammars
Extent: 9 folders, 2 boxes
Description: Materials relating to James M. Crawford's interest in and study of the Catawba language. Items include card-sized paper slips, Catawba-English and English-Catawba, with pencilled notes in Series V. Card Files. There are also nine Catawba folders in Series IV-D. Research Notes and Notebooks--Other. One stand-alone undated folder contains mostly handwritten notes, including a comparison of Catawba to Yuchi, notes on references to Catawbas in Barton (1798), bibliographic sources on Catawba language and lingustics, and English-Catawba Vocabularies. Other indigenous languages and groups mentioned include Chickasaw, Delaware, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Tuscarora. The other eight folders each contain one of Raven Ioor McDavid's Catawba research notebooks, recorded in 1941 and given to Crawford in 1970 (see letter in McDavid correspondence in Series I. Correspondence). The notebooks in Folders 1-5 and 7 seem to be fairly straightforward linguistic material, focusing on narrative and interrogative statements and related vocabulary, verb tenses, pronouns, stems, etc. The notebook in Folder 6 is similar, but also contains notes on loose-page pages, including about 20 pages of Catawba geneaological information over multiple generations. The most prominent family names include Blue, Harris, Cantey, Brown, George, Sanders, and Ayers; other family names mentioned include Beck, Starnes, Cobb, Mush, Scott, Lee, White, Wheelock, Garci, Allen, Helam, Wiley, Gordon, Crawford, Gaudy, Blankenship, Millins, Watts, and Johnson. The notebook in Folder 8 focuses on stories--many about old women, animals, and interactions between female and animal characters--given first in English and then in Catawba with interlineal translation.
Collection: James M. Crawford Papers Mss.Ms.Coll.66