Nineteenth Century Domestic Life

Albee, Parker Bishop. Letters from Sea, 1882-1901: Joanna and Lincoln Colcord's Seafaring Childhood .
Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House, 1999 . The story of two Searsport children who were born at sea and spent a great deal of their childhood on their father's vessel. The letters were the result of part of the family staying at home in Searsport. The Museum has an exhibit about the lives and travels of the Colcords.

Butler, Joyce. "Family & Community Life," in Judd, Richard W., Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman, Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present. Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 1995.
Fournier, Constance Anne. "Home Folks: Maritime Couples of Penobscot Bay Sustain Family and Community Ashore and at Sea," in Weiner, Marli F. (ed.), Of Place and Gender: Women in Maine History. Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 2005.

Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. HS/Adult. Very detailed source for information on family structure, domestic life, customs, gender roles, child-rearing, and social climate in the latter part of the 19th century.

Griffin, Ralph H. Jr. (ed.). Letters of a New England Coaster, 1868-1872 . [No publisher], 1968. The correspondence of Captain Joseph Griffin of Stockton, Maine, much of it between himself and his wife. There is a very interesting segment from a period when he was in a Cuban jail and she was alone on board his schooner.

Heininger, Mary Lynn Stevens et al. A Century of Childhood: 1820-1920 . Rochester, NY: The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984. Children's lives in the Northeast and society's ideas about child-raising.

Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood . New York: Corinth Books, 1961. A memoir of life in mid-19th century Massachusetts.

Montgomery Ward. Catalogue and Buyers Guide, 1894-95, No. 56 (fall and winter) . New York: Bounty Books, 1969. Good source of information about what people used in everyday life at the end of the 19th century.

Montgomery Ward. Catalogue and Buyers Guide, 1895, No. 57 (spring and summer) . New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Murphy, Kevin D. Colonial Revival Maine . New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. The architecture of Maine.

Oliver, Sandra L. Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and their Food, at Sea and Ashore, in the Nineteenth Century . Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1995. A history of food in coastal New England, including acquisition, preservation and preparation traditions and recipes.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. The 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1976.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. The 1902 Edition of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue . New York: Bounty Books 1969.
Wasson, George. Sailing Days on the Penobscot: The River and Bay as They Were in the Old Days . Salem, Mass.: Marine Research Society, 1932.