Recordings of traditional stories, autobiographical narratives, and conversations given by 11 Algonquin speakers in Kitiganik, Quebec.

In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, as a center for the study of human heredity and a repository for genetic data on human traits. It merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution in 1920 to become the Department of Genetics at the Carnegie Institution, and under the direction of Charles B. Davenport and later of Albert Blakeslee and Milislav Demerec, it became the most important center for eugenic research in the nation. However with intellectual currents shifting, the Carnegie Institution stopped funding the office in 1939. It remained active until 1944, when its records were transferred to the Charles Fremont Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota. When the Dight closed in 1991, the genealogical material was filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah and given to the Center for Human Genetics; the non-genealogical material was not filmed and was given to the American Philosophical Society Library. Following the original order, the ERO Records are organized into thirteen series: I. Trait Files, 1670-1964 ; II. Trait Card Boxes, 1904-1939 ; III. Family Traits Card Boxes, 1920-1939 ; IV. RFT Submitters Card Catalog, 1910s-1930s ; V. Record of Family Traits, 1911-1940 ; VI. Fitter Family Studies, 1913-1936 ; VII. Field Worker Files, 1911-1926 ; VIII. Volunteer Collaborators, 1912-1939 ; IX. Pedigrees, 1828-1926 ; X. Harry H. Laughlin Files, 1915-1938 ; XI. Bibliographia Eugenica, 1734-1934 ; XII. Midget Schedules, 1919-1964 ; XIII. Index Card Boxes, 1910s-1930s.

Anthropologist and ethnographer Frank Gouldsmith Speck was one of Franz Boas' early graduate students and from 1907 till his death in 1950 spent his career in a variety of positions at the University of Pennsylvania, including its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Speck chose to study the cultures of Indigenous peoples of eastern North America, especially the Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, and peoples speaking Algonquian languages, such as Anishinaabe, Wabanaki, Innu, Lenape, and other Algonquian peoples within the eastern United States. Speck spent a larger amounnt of time in the field than was typical of most ethnographers, collecting documentary information and physical objects. The Frank G. Speck Papers consist of 15.5 linear feet of Speck's professional correspondence, field notes, lecture notes, and manuscripts of published and unpublished works. The material focuses on the Eastern Woodlands Indians, particularly the Catawba, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Houma, Haudenosaunee ("Iroquois"), Labrador Inuit ("Eskimo"), Innu ("Montagnais-Naskapi"), Nanticoke, Penobscot, Powhatan, Algonquian, and Yuchi. The collection is divided into two subcollections: Subcollection 1 is comprised of Speck's research material and correspondence, and Subcollection 2 consists of his manuscripts and related correspondence. The two subcollections were acquired separately by the Society, and were originally cataloged as the Frank G. Speck Papers (572.97 Sp3) and the Frank G. Speck Manuscripts on Native Americans (970.3 Sp3p) respectively.