Amy Heard: Historical Traces

This site contains a collection of writings incorporating the journals and letters written by or to my grandmother Amy Heard Gray (1860-1949) during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Amy Heard was the daughter of Augustine Heard Jr., the nephew of Augustine Heard of Ipswich, the founder of Augustine Heard and Co.

Since finding in 1982 a cache of letters written in the 1880s - 1890s in the papers of my father, Augstine Heard Gray, my hobby has been transcribing and translating his mother's journals and letters and researching the people and places occuring in the material. Through the past four decades I have written several articles for family, friends, and few historians on stories relating to Amy's ancestors, friends, and their relatives and stories.

In recent years I have made an effort to update, merge, and unify the material and to provide background and context for the many stories included. On 24 September 2021 I posted a draft of the result as Amy Heard: Historical Traces.

This online book is a work-in-progress and is updated regularly as new material is incorporated and old corrected and revised.

Most recent update: 23 June 2023

Note:

In order to post a file of manageable size, it has been compressed to around 20M, with the result that the many images are adequate for computer viewing, but not high resolution. The full resolution veersion is around 170M, but the photos and maps are of much higher quality. It is available by request.

During recent years the editing of the journals and letters has been supplemented additional information regarding their historical context, which is now provided in the first part of the book. The book focuses on several generations of the Taylor, De Coninck, Heard, and Gray families, but it is a book of stories revealed by the journals and letters rather than a book on genealogy. The extensive new background material researched and written during the pandemic now provides background and insight into the letters and journals and the people and places in them.

Because many of my earlier writings on Amy have found their way into citations in other web pages as well as published articles and books, I am leaving the earlier manuscripts available as they were with links on this page so that they remain available. The new manuscript corrects many errors in the earlier docments which have propagated on the Web and elsewhere. Perhaps the most notable error is the confusion of names Amelia and Amalia in reference to both places and people. Usually it turns out the names are equivalent, just variants of the same name (along with Amelie). Rather than change my earlier writings, I will just state that I am more confident in the historical facts and conjectures in the new edition.
The older manuscripts with links below are incorporated into the new manuscript, with the exception of the two articles on the poisoning incident in Hong Kong.

Amy Heard: Letters from the Gilded Age


5 August 2009

This site provides an old html version of the book Amy Heard: Letters from the Gilded Age . The book is also available in an Adobe portable document format (PDF) version.

Some additional related supporting material is also available.

In 2004 a photo album was found in a Baltimore junkyard. Finding Amy Heard and Max Heard named on the back of some photos, the finders tracked me down through the Internet. These 1870s-1880s photos, which include pictures of Amy, Max, and Jane Heard along with several unidentified people are viewable at http://ee.stanford.edu/~gray/Baltimore_Heard/. Some of the photographs are by the most famous photographers of the time, including Mathew Brady. I suspect the unidentified photos are relatives of Jane Leep DeConinck's mother, Amelia Williams (Taylor) De Coninck of Baltimore.

The book consists primarily of letters written to Amy Heard during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially from her friend Victoria Sackville-West, the mother of writer Vita Sackville-West, and her sisters. Extensive commentary places the letters in context and describes many of the people mentioned.

During summer 2005 I finally began adding the original French versions of the letters, and have corrected many transcription and translation errors.

Max & Max

Transcriptions and translations of letters from Amy's Heard's sister Max and her parents from Seoul, Korea, to Amy during the period 1891-1893 during which Amy's father, Augustine Heard, was the U.S. Minister to Korea. The main story in the letters is the romance between Max and Max von Brandt, the German minister to Peking. A second story is the difficult adjustment of an American family to life in Seoul. The letters are being included in both the original French and in translation. I am slowly adding commentary and footnotes on the people mentioned in the letters and on Korea of that period. A pdf is also available, but the photo quality is not good as my scanning talents are inadequate.

Jean Brown has kindly provided three items relating to Mrs. Greathouse, who is mentioned in Max & Max. These are A newspaper article describing Mrs. Greathouse's adventures in Korea following her return, a short biography of Clarence Greathouse from the Dictionary of American Biography, and Chapter X on Greathouse from the Fantastic City San Francisco historical Website.

The 1857 Hong Kong Poisoning

Memoirs by Albert Farley Heard and Augustine Heard, Jr.

Poisoning by Wholesale: A Reminiscence of China Life A manuscript by Albert Farley Heard written during the 1880s regarding the panic in China in 1857.

The Poisoning in HongKong --- An Episode of Life in China, Forty Years Another memoir of the Hong Kong poisoning incident, this time by Augustine Heard, Albert Farley Heard's brother. Written about 1894,

Permission is hereby given to freely print and circulate copies of these items so long as it is left intact, proper acknowledgement is given, and the material is not reproduced for commercial purposes. The author would welcome all reports of typos and comments.