Trained as an anthropologist under Frank Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, the ethnohistorian George Snyderman (1908- ) spent his career studying Seneca Indian religion, history, and culture. Snyderman edited the previously unpublished diaries of Halliday Jackson and John Phillips, Quaker missionaries to the Senecas in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Snyderman Papers includes a small volume of correspondence, along with manuscripts of works by Snyderman and colleagues, and copies of primary source materials pertaining to Seneca history. Of particular interest is his correspondence with anthropologists William N. Fenton, Merle Deardorff, and Frank Speck and with his Seneca consultant Clara Redeye and her daughter, Helen Harris, and photographs of the Allegany Senecas taken by Fenton and Speck.

This collection consists of Ottawa songs, interviews, word lists, legends, Nanabojo stories, autobiographical stories, and information on Ottawa history. Some of the material is given in both Ottawa and English, some in Ottawa only. Recorded by Jane Ettawageshik in Michigan from 1947 to 1948.