Like many middle-class Boston girls of the late 19th century, Annie McFarlane kept an autograph album, in which her schoolmates, family, and neighbours wrote messages of friendship and scraps of sentimental verse. This keepsake, with its stamped and coloured binding, was passed down through McFarlane''s family to her great-grandson, the independent scholar Theodore Dawes. Fascinated by the faded inscriptions in so many varied hands - from the spiky script of Andrew McFarlane (Father) to the laboured cursive of young Flossie L. Law - Dawes undertook an arduous course of archival research aimed at uncovering the identity and biographical details of everyone who signed the album.The result is this book, in which each page of Annie McFarlane''s autograph album is reproduced in facsimile, along with the biography of the person who signed it. Together these brief yet telling portraits reveal the texture of life in Boston circa 1890, as well as in Vanceboro, Maine, where the McFarlan
