Donnelly's Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers include letters to Donnelly, copies of letters sent by Donnelly, bills, receipts, cancelled checks, and other financial records, legal documents, notes and drafts of speeches, articles and poems, clippings from newspapers and magazines, some maps and plats, and other miscellaneous items.

Most of these records were kept by Donnelly for many years in bundles in the drawers beneath the bookcases in the study of his home at Nininger. More than two hundred bundles, comprising the bulk of the correspondence and miscellaneous papers, were given to the Society by Mrs. Marion Donnelly Woltman and Professor Henry L. Woltman in 1914. When the papers were arranged the next year, a file of letters of a personal nature was returned to Mrs. Woltman. Most of these letters appear to have been returned to the collection in gifts from Mrs. Woltman in later years.

When in the 1930s many Donnelly volumes were given to the Society, a number of loose clippings were removed and placed in a separate file. These clippings, bearing the old number of the volume from which they were taken, have been interfiled in the correspondence along with a large file of previously disarranged clippings that came to the collection at various times. Some of these incomplete or defective clippings have been replaced, in microfilming, by more complete pages from the Society's newspaper files. Photocopies of three other newspapers, the St. Louis Republic (July 22, 1896) and the St. Louis Globe Democrat (July 22 and 23, 1896), were supplied by the St. Louis (Missouri) Public Library.

The papers are filed and microfilmed in chronological order, with a few exceptions. Financial papers of the 1850s are often filed in monthly folders rather than by individual dates within the month. Subscription lists, which appear to be for the newspaper Representative, are all filed under date of April 19, 1893 (roll 107); several reports on the Ignatius Donnelly and Family Papers, for various dates, are filed under date of December 13, 1909 (roll 132). Enclosures, no matter what their date, have been filed after the item with which they were enclosed. Over the years, however, many enclosures have become separated from the letters that enclosed them, and if they are in the collection at all, are filed and filmed in chronological order wherever they appear.

Special mention should be made of Donnelly's speech notes. He frequently repeated his speeches in different places at different times. The notes are filed under one date and photocopies of the first page of the speech are filed under dates in other years when Donnelly repeated the speech, referring the reader to the original notes. Frequently, too, Donnelly put notes for two different speeches on the two sides of his note paper. The notes on one side for one speech are filmed together; then the note pages were turned over and rearranged to film the notes for the second speech.

Donnelly often drafted the answer to a letter on the back page of a letter received. When the date of the letter and the date of the answer are widely separated or a large number of letters intervene between the date of the letter received and its answer, a photocopy of the answer is placed in chronological order in the file and the answer is thus filmed twice.

The reader is advised to use undated items and items which are dated in brackets with some caution. Since it was not possible in the preparation of these papers for microfilming to spend the time necessary for a full study of these dates, particularly for the period after 1889, there may be errors in dating.

Nine letters of the 1890s appear in the Ignatius Donnelly and family papers as photostats of originals in the Henry Demarest Lloyd and Luman H. Weller Papers in the collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, Wisconsin). These letters, listed below, are reproduced here with the permission of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the reader is cautioned not to use them or quote from them without obtaining permission from that Society.

Donnelly to Henry Demarest Lloyd: May 30, 1893; May 26, May 28, 1895; August 11, 1898. Donnelly to Luman H. Weller: June 10, July 23, August 6, 1891; January 18, April 16, 1892.

Donnelly's Literary Materials include manuscripts of published books, unpublished manuscripts for two books, essays, a short story, articles, speeches, and many research and reading notes. The manuscripts are largely Donnelly's own, although a few appear to be the work of other persons. Printed materials relate largely to the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy.

The papers in this section are items which did not easily fit into the chronological order of Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers. Many are undated, and many seemed significant enough as literary manuscripts to warrant their arrangement in this separate category.

Despite this separate section of Literary Materials, there are many other items of literary interest throughout the Ignatius Donnelly and family papers. There is much related information in the Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, in the Volumes, and in the Library Pamphlets.

Many of the literary materials in this section came to the Minnesota Historical Society long after the bulk of the Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers was given in 1914. These materials came in little or no order after years of neglect in the Donnelly home at Nininger. Among them was a genealogy and history of the Donnelly family which consisted of incomplete fragments of a more extensive manuscript. Mr. Philip C. Donnelly (St. Paul, Minnesota) loaned the Society his more complete copy of this manuscript for photographing in this microfilm edition. Several pamphlets and circulars were also borrowed from the Society's library collections and included among the Bacon-Shakespeare printed material.

Microfilm M138 also contains 130 volumes (1847-1903). They are miscellaneous (volumes 1-3); diaries and memorandum books (volumes 4-68); address books (volumes 69-70); letter books (volumes 71-78); financial records (volumes 79-97); scrapbooks (volumes 98-126); and literary scrapbooks (volumes 127-130).

The volumes came to the Society at various times and at long intervals between 1901 and 1954. Some were kept in the library while the rest were filed with the manuscript papers. A few volumes had never been cataloged and some others that were cataloged were closed to the public. In preparing the collection for microfilming, all volumes were brought together and put in the order in which they are now listed.

There are page numbers in some of the volumes; others have none. In some of the letter books, pages are numbered on one side while the letter is copied on the other side, and some letter press copies are reproduced more than once on differently numbered pages. Numbered pages are missing in other volumes. Blank pages are generally not filmed. A few volumes are indexed and the indices are filmed at the beginning of the volumes in which they are found. Memorabilia such as tickets, programs, maps, etc., found between pages of volumes are photographed where they were found. Such material in flap pockets of the diaries and memorandum books was copied at the beginning or end of the volume in which it was found.

Paper in some volumes is mildewed, tattered, torn or insect eaten; pencil writing is often smudged, and ink writing, particularly in letter books, often seeps through to adjacent pages. Many newspaper clippings are badly deteriorated. For some of them a clear copy was substituted from the Society's newspaper files. For many, however, it was only possible to indicate the name of the newspaper and date of the clipping and to attempt with various photographic techniques to make as clear a copy as the original allowed. Oversize items folded in volumes were unfolded and photographed where they were found. Many clippings in the scrapbooks are pasted on the pages of volumes of government reports. There, and in the diaries and memorandum books, they are pasted on the pages in almost every conceivable way, sometimes over writing, and many are discolored by the glue or paste used.

The title of a volume is not a clear indication of all that the volume contains. Diaries and memorandum books, for example, contain clippings, financial records of cash received, bills paid, daily personal and family expenses, records of farm work done and contracts with farm workers, pages of jokes and anecdotes and reading notes used in Donnelly speeches and literary endeavors, election returns, railroad time tables, county maps, lists of appointments, lecture engagements, and subscribers to Donnelly newspapers, year-end reflections, as well as the traditional day-to-day entries. Some diaries are devoted almost entirely to political affairs.

The term "Memorandum Book" covers a great diversity of materials, too, but all have some personal notes in Donnelly's handwriting to distinguish them from the scrapbooks which are largely only clippings, although the distinction between the two categories is sometimes very fine.

A few scrapbooks, for example, also contain letters, notes, programs, tickets, badges, menus, broadsides, business cards, circulars, etc., in addition to clippings.

The reader who has difficulty reading some of the entries in the diaries and memorandum books is referred to a transcription of parts of these volumes in the Literary Materials. In 1891 Donnelly hired a stenographer to copy parts of many of these entries. The transcription, entitled "My Journal," was edited by Donnelly and is found on roll 133. Another edited transcription of large parts of the diaries (not a part of this microfilm) was made by Theodore Nydahl and is part of the MHS library collection.

Even the dates of Donnelly volumes must be accepted with caution. Although the inventory dates describe the bulk of entries for that volume, it may also contain other scattered items and entries for other years. Significant information for other years in particular volumes is noted in the inventory below.

Similarly, Donnelly may have intended to reserve some volumes for special subjects, such as the Nininger town site letter books or the Farmers Alliance scrapbooks. When the bulk of entries relate to a special subject, that fact is indicated in the inventory. In general, however, one may expect to find a great variety of personal, political, or literary information in almost any volume.

Following the last volume (roll 163) are microfilmed catalog cards that list significant materials by or about Donnelly in the manuscript collections held by the Minnesota Historical Society at the time these papers were microfilmed.

Most significant of the Donnelly holdings in the MHS library are seventy-seven volumes of pamphlets—containing in addition to pamphlets, legal and governmental reports, programs, clippings, sections of newspapers, broadsides, circulars, other miscellaneous printed materials and a few manuscript items. Donnelly himself sorted and arranged these materials for binding in 1890 and presumably chose the titles by which the volumes are identified. Volumes 1-72 were presented to the library in 1914 by Mrs. Marion Donnelly Woltman and Professor Henry L. Woltman. Volumes 73-77 were the gift of Mrs. Woltman in 1947.

Some of the volumes have tables of contents, although they are not always entirely accurate. A few of the inclusive dates given for volumes are incorrect. Correct dates are given in brackets in the roll inventory below. Some volumes contain extraneous items unrelated to the subject indicated by the volume title. A few titles are confusing: for example, volumes identified as relating to the 39th and 40th Congresses appear to be largely items collected by Donnelly during his congressional service. Volumes labeled "Miscellaneous" may contain items relating to special subjects covered in other volumes. In fact, almost any generalization about the contents of the volumes is apt to be misleading.

Only selected pages (not the complete volumes) have been microfilmed. Copied for each volume are the following: the spine and cover; the table of contents where one is part of the volume; and the title page of each item in each volume, or in some cases, either the first page or enough of an oversize page to enable the reader to obtain the title.

The items are copied in the order in which they appear in each volume, but the reader is cautioned that the penciled numbers in the right-hand corner of many items are not always a correct indication of sequence, since some items were overlooked by whomever made this index. The reader should also note the possibility that some of the items in the Library Pamphlets are duplicated in other places in the Ignatius Donnelly and Family Papers. It was not possible, in preparing the collection for microfilming, to make the exhaustive search necessary to point out such duplication.

A citation to any item found among these pamphlet volumes should give the title of the item and the Donnelly pamphlet volume number in which it is found.

On the microfilm following the selected pages from the Library Pamphlets are copies of catalog cards showing the MHS library holdings of books and other printed items relating to Donnelly.

These manuscript items were contained in a scrapbook belonging to Mrs. Katherine (nee Giltinan) Bowen, a granddaughter of Ignatius Donnelly. Photocopies were made, microfilmed as supplemental material to M138, and interfiled in Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (Closed Originals). Notes made on the items by Mrs. Bowen are in purple ink.

The items include cards, invitations, programs and letters chiefly of autograph interest. The photocopies are arranged and filmed in chronological order. The correspondents are listed here alphabetically: John C. Breckinridge, Benjamin H. Brewster, David Paul Brown, General Andrew G. Curtin, Mrs. Mary B. (William Jennings) Bryan, Charles Darwin, James A. Garfield, Henry George, William E. Gladstone, Horace Greeley, H. W. Halleck, Oliver W. Holmes, Joseph Jefferson, William Lochren, Justin McCarthy, James Whitcomb Riley, William H. Seward, Edwin Sherman, William T. Sherman, William H. Smith, John H. Stevens, Adolph Sutra, Walt Whitman, and Fernando Wood.

Many, though not all, of these originals have since been acquired by the MHS and are described in Manuscript Material.

Concerns campaign books about People's Party and James B. Weaver.

For an Alliance meeting to organize a local grain growers' association.

Describes Donnelly materials she has found.

Topics include a poor wheat crop, growing of black walnuts, the land office, election returns, farmers and free trade, and an article on Ignatius Donnelly.

On Republican Party election returns and on Henry Demarest Lloyd's exposure of the Standard Oil Company.

Made in United States Senate about tariff and internal revenue laws.

Katherine J. Donnelly's membership card for the Sacred Heart Union in Behalf of the Catholic Protectory and Industrial School (Arlington, New Jersey), with image of St. Catherine on back.