The notebook includes descriptions of land surveys in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, and notes in various hands on early history and settlers there. The maps include boundary descriptions, and there are copies of two deeds.

Trained as an anthropologist at Berkeley under A.L. Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Carl Voegelin spent the majority of his career as a structural linguist specializing in Algonquian languages, including Delaware, Potawatomi, Fox, Menominee, and Shawnee, and on the Seneca, Ojibwa (Chippewa), and Blackfoot (Siksika). His most significant contributions came through his studies of Delaware, Shawnee, and Hopi, but he is also credited with reviving the International Journal of American Linguistics after the death of its founder, Franz Boas, and with nurturing the program in anthropology at Indiana University, where he was on faculty from 1941 until his retirement in 1976. The Voegelin collection contains field notes, lexical files, notebooks, papers, correspondence, and other materials relating to Voegelin's work on Native American languages. The bulk of the collection concerns Delaware and Shawnee, but there is significant material for Blackfoot, Menominee, Ojibwa and Potawatomi, Seneca, and Penobscot. Notes on Turkish, kept during the Second World War, are also present. Among other important series in the collection are Voegelin's correspondence and notes concerning two of his major projects: the translation and interpretation of the Walam Olam and his study of Shawnee law. Correspondents include Leonard Bloomfield, Eli Lilly, and Morris Swadesh. A portion of the collection is indexed in Kendall (1982).

A Yale-educated ethnographer, William Fenton devoted most of his career to study of the Haudenosaunee. Receiving his doctorate in 1937, Fenton worked with the Bureau of American Ethnology for a number of years before becoming Director of the New York State Museum and professor at SUNY Albany. The Fenton Papers covers all aspects of William Fenton's professional life, documenting his varied positions as community worker for the New York Agency of the U.S. Indian Service, 1935-1937 (accounts, reports, correspondence); associate anthropologist and senior ethnologist in the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1939-1951 (includes notebooks, letters from the field); Executive Secretary of Anthropology and Psychology, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, 1952-1954; and Assistant Commissioner, New York State Museum and Science Service, 1954-1968.

The most stellar member of a stellar family, Elisha Kent Kane was among the most popular American explorers of the mid-nineteenth century, a hero in the tragic mode. Born in Philadelphia in 1820, the son of John Kintzing Kane and Jane Duval Leiper, Kane studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before earning a commission as a naval surgeon. While in the Navy, Kane embarked on the succession of voyages to exotic locales that became the basis for his extraordinary fame. In 1843, he attended Caleb Cushing's first diplomatic mission to China as ship's physician, and subsequently traveled to the Philippines and Western Africa. Distinguishing himself in the Mexican War, Kane's greatest fame came from two expeditions to the arctic, aiming to locate the lost explorer, Sir John Franklin and to explore for evidence of the open polar sea. Kane died in 1857 while attempting to organize a third arctic voyage. Part of the Kane Family Collection, the Papers of Elisha Kent Kane contain a mix of personal and family correspondence with correspondence relating to all of Kane's explorations. Intelligent, articulate and very much a romantic, Kane's letters are expressive and passionate. The collection provides fine documentation of youth, his relationship with the Spiritualist Margaret Fox, and of course his travels to China and off the coast of Africa in 1846. Kane's two expeditions to the arctic are particularly well documented, with correspondence, notes, logbooks, diaries, and sketches, as well as Kane's post-expedition notes, writings, and lectures recounting his experiences.