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 Snyderman edited the previously unpublished diaries of Halliday Jackson and John Phillips, Quaker missionaries to the Senecas in the late 18th and early 19th century.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.

The papers contain correspondence, research and teaching notes, data (card and slip) files, published and unpublished manuscripts by Lounsbury and others, books and reprints, sound recordings, and computer programs and files. Correspondents include: William N. Fenton, Mary R. Haas, William C. Sturtevant, Morris Swadesh, and Carl F. Voegelin. Roughly one-quarter of the collection relates to Iroquoian languages and includes much WPA Oneida Project material. Research into the Cherokee language, South American languages, and kinship structures is also well represented. Floyd Lounsbury's wife, Masako Yokoyama Lounsbury, is represented by a smaller amount of material relating to linguistic research in Shanghai and research on Quechua.