An extensive family collection, the Vaux Family Papers center around the lives of George Vaux V (1721-1803), George Vaux VII (1779-1836), and George Vaux VIII (1832-1915), their business partners, siblings, wives, and children, and encompasses the extended Vaux family of Warders, Sansoms, Heads, Graffs, Morrises, Cressons, and Mayberrys. The collection includes correspondence, financial accounts, receipts, business records, journals, diaries, photographs, and legal documents.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999), physical anthropologist, was a prominent figure in American intellectual life. British by birth, educated at University College London and the London School of Economics, then Columbia University in New York City, Montagu was a persistent advocate for gender and racial equality. He was a tireless activist for human understanding and child welfare in particular. Departing from academe in 1955, a victim of McCarthyite hysteria, he was a remarkably prolific writer and speaker, eventually publishing more than 50 books, over 40 of them after he left the academy. Montagu continued to lobby passionately against the primacy of race in discussions of intellect and skill, and undertook works in a wide variety of fields, from evolution to parenting. Some of his most significant works include Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), the UNESCO Statement on Race (1951), Man and Aggression (1968) and his novel The Elephant Man (1971), which became the basis for an award winning play and movie. Ashley Montagu's contributions to the spread of scientific knowledge and human understanding make him one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century.

Raymond Pearl spent the majority of his academic career (1918-1940) at Johns Hopkins University, where he was Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics and Director of the Institute of Biological Research. Founder of the Quarterly Review of Biology and Human Biology, he made significant contributions in the areas of biology, genetics, eugenics, and statistics. The Pearl Papers includes correspondence as well as notebooks, scrapbooks, diplomas, photographs, and 33 volumes of diaries. There is significant correspondence with his wife, Maud (ca. 500 letters), and mother, Ida May (ca. 300 letters), particularly for the years 1895-1934. Of special note is Pearl's correspondence with his friend, colleague, and fellow Baltimoreian, H. L. Mencken (ca. 500 letters). The collection contains important information on the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, The Baltimore Sun, the Birth Control Federation of America, Dartmouth College, the International Institute of Statistics, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Academy of Sciences. This note is currently under review for revision.

A product of the distinctive culture of reform in antebellum Philadelphia, William Parker Foulke was the scion of the old elite who put a conservative stamp on social change. Trained as an attorney, Foulke spent much of his adult life engaging his deep amateur interest in natural history and mental philosophy and devoting himself to a variety of civic and philanthropic causes, including the colonization of formerly enslaved persons, penal reform, and cultural institutions in his native Philadelphia. The Foulke Papers are the product of the diverse social and intellectual interests of the Philadelphia attorney and philanthropist William Parker Foulke. Consisting primarily of correspondence, notes, and essays, the collection touches on Foulke's many interests. The collection includes numerous lectures delivered by Foulke along with material on the Lancaster County Prison, New York Prison Association, and the Philadelphia Society For Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons; notebooks concerning prisons and prisoners, including a 1846-1852 diary, and a listing of prisoners, their race, age, crime, sentence, and observations; a diary concerning the American Colonization Society (1852); a copy of an arctic diary (1853-1854) by John Wall Wilson, in the hand of Isaac Israel Hayes, which recounts much of the journey aboard the brig Advance, commanded by Elisha Kent Kane. There is also a list of buildings (1820-1841) designed by John Haviland, and material on the American Academy of Music, Philadelphia.

One of the oldest houses in Philadelphia, Wyck is now a non-profit museum listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Nine generations of the Jansen-Wistar-Haines family owned the Wyck property from 1690 until 1973. The last family owner deeded 2.5 acres of land, the house and its contents, several outbuildings, a landscaped garden, and a small endowment to the Wyck Charitable Trust. The Wyck Charitable Trust and the Wyck Association now administer the preservation of the property and its educational services to the public. This collection contains diaries, letters, accounts, bills and receipts, deeds, and photographs. The collection as a whole is deepest for the period 1770-1970. Items of particular note include accounts of household expenses at Wyck from ca. 1790-1970; papers pertaining to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Quaker schools, and social reform groups; agricultural and horticultural practices; and correspondence to and from cultural leaders of 18th and 19th century Philadelphia. The papers of the John S. Haines family (Ms. Coll. 52A) form part of the Wyck Papers. The papers cover the years 1845 to 1949 and are arranged into eight series.

This is a collection of letters, letterbooks, account books, scrapbooks, etc., concerning the families of Robert Hare and Thomas Willing. The letters and other documents include early family material, as well as documents written by numerous family relations, and some obviously only collected by them. The Willing family letters (1744-1901) are diverse, concerning family matters, business, society, comments on the Civil War, etc. There are numerous letters from Thomas Willing, many concerning his banking career, as President of the Bank of North America and later at the first Bank of the U.S. The Hare family letters (1724-1965) are more extensive and diverse, including much on travel in the U.S. and elsewhere. There is a letter from Robert Hare Jr. concerning steam engines, and letters from Horace Binney Hare concerning his education at Harvard, 1860, his trip to San Francisco and the west, 1862, and numerous letters written while a soldier in the Civil War. There are many letters from Horace Binney (1780-1875, DAB) to his daughter Esther, who was married to John Innes Clark Hare (1816-1905, DAB), concerning family travel and court cases. There are also letters from outside the family, such as those from Dorothea L. Dix. The bound volumes include, among others: Robert Hare letterbooks (1824-1825, 1841-1857), estate records, and laboratory expense accounts (1818-1860); G. H. Hare's journal or log of cruises aboard the U.S. United States (1841) and U.S. Flint (1845); Horace Binney Hare's 1862 journal of his trip to San Francisco. There are account books and accounts (1754-1795) kept by Thomas Willing; accounts of the controversy over the estate of John Innes Clark; and records of the First Colored Wesley Methodist Church of Philadelphia (receipt book, 1820-1848; minute book, 1827-1844). There are also Philadelphia court records, and minutes of the Common Council of the city, 1832.