VOLUME X, NUMBER 1

A message from the President

Hello Cousins,

We hope your Holidays were pleasant and enjoyable. Currently your Family Association

is planning the details of the June 22, 2013 Annual Reunion with a “gathering of family”

dinner on Friday, June 21. This year’s Reunion will be held at Mount Holyoke College in

South Hadley at the Willits-Hallowell Center. Mount Holyoke College will be an excellent

venue to host our guest speaker, Clifford Stott. We can all look forward to hearing about

his research into the early origins of the Dickinson family in England. Clifford is an

award-winning author of several articles and books. He is a Certified Genealogist and an

Accredited Genealogist as well as a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists.

Clifford is also a contributing editor to The American Genealogist as well as a consulting

editor to The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. More information is

available at his website clstott.com. Moreover, he is a Dickinson descendant (one of us!).

Please plan to be with us this June for this very important Reunion.

Andrew Dickinson, President

2013 SCHOLARSHIP FORMS AVAILABLE      Application forms are now available for the 2013 DFA scholarship.  Applicants must be descendants of Nathaniel Dickinson and must be accepted to a four-year college or university.  The deadline for submission is April 30, 2013.  Full information on requirements and an application form may be found on our website.  For additional information you may contact our scholarship chair, Jean Blackmer, 4 Waterford Way, Manchester, NH 03102, jeanmblackmer@gmail.com.     As always, we rely on contributions from DFA members to sustain and increase the scholarship fund.  If you are able, we would appreciate your help.  Indicate “scholarship fund” on the January Survey form if you wish to make a donation.

VIEW EMILY DICKINSON MANUSCRIPTS ONLINE      Amherst College has been digitizing their special collections and has recently announced that their Emily Dickinson Collection is now available for viewing online.  This includes 850 manuscripts of poems, letters, recipes, etc. by Emily Dickinson.  To view these items, go to acdc.amherst.edu and then click on the Emily Dickinson Collection link.  You can view these as a “guest” for free.     You may click on the thumbnails to download enlarged images of these actual manuscripts.  Alternatively, you can search for a particular poem by its first line or by its Franklin or Johnson number.  You can search for letter by the recipient name.     Although Amherst College has only a portion of the 1789 poems by Dickinson, they have reached an agreement with Harvard to make all the manuscripts available online by the year 2014.  There are many other fascinating items in the Amherst College Digital Collections website which you may want to explore while you’re at it. Alan Dickinson

ANNUAL JANUARY SURVEY      Enclosed with this newsletter is a response card on which you can indicate your tentative intention to attend this year’s reunion.  It also gives you an opportunity to offer your help to the association.  Some of the volunteer work requires that you be able to attend board meetings (usually 3 per year) which currently are held in W. Springfield and Sturbridge, MA.  Distance exempts many of you from this, but we do have a large number of members who live close enough.  We really hope you will give favorable consideration to helping us out.  The association can’t exist without these volunteers.     Also this is the time we ask you to consider a monetary gift to the association.  As you know, we rely on contributions from members for our operating expenses and also to support and build up our scholarship fund.  Please return the response card in the envelope provided, together with your check, if you are able, made out to The Dickinson Family Association.

NEWSLETTER ALERT      The DFA newsletter typically goes out in January, April, June and November of each year.  The June and November newsletters go out by e-mail to those who are able and willing to receive it this way, and it does save the association time and money.  If you received your last newsletter (Nov. 2012) by postal mail, that means either you have indicated you don’t wish to receive the newsletters electronically, or we do not have a valid e-mail address for you.     We know e-mail addresses change frequently and it is easy to forget to update them.  So if you change your e-mail address we would greatly appreciate your sending the new one to our membership clerk, Beth Landolina, at bethl0719@comcast.net.