Table of Contents
Harvard In Memoriam volumes
In the autumn of 1865, Thomas Wentworth Higginson sat down to write letters. The war was over. Harvard had sent roughly a thousand men into uniform and 136 of them had not come back, and Higginson (abolitionist, colonel of the first Black regiment in the Union Army, Class of 1841) had been asked to compile their memorial notices into a book. What arrived in his post over the following months were not just the dry facts of rank and regiment. Families sent him letters their sons had written from camp, photographs, school reports, transcripts of last words spoken to surgeons in field hospitals. “The materials,” he wrote in his preface, “were richer than I had dared to hope.”
The two volumes he produced in 1866 under the title Harvard Memorial Biographies are not a casualty list. They are something much more useful to a researcher: 136 detailed life-histories, each naming the subject’s parents, birthplace, schooling, Harvard class, subsequent occupation, and the precise circumstances of death. They are the earliest, most concentrated example of what would become a defining feature of Harvard’s relationship with its dead alumni, the impulse not merely to record a name but to preserve a life.
If you have Harvard ancestors from roughly 1850 to 1930, there is a good chance that one of these publications contains more information about them than any other single source outside a family Bible.
What the Harvard Memorial Biographies actually contain
Robert Gould Shaw, Class of 1860, is the most celebrated of Higginson’s 136 subjects, the colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry killed at Fort Wagner in July 1863 whose story was later told in the film Glory. His entry runs to several pages and names his parents, Francis George Shaw and Sarah Blake Sturgis, his siblings, his schooling in Staten Island and Neuchâtel, his Harvard years, and the full trajectory of his regimental command.
But Shaw takes up no more space than James Jackson Lowell, Class of 1858, a lawyer’s son from Boston who died of wounds at Glendale in June 1862, or Charles Russell Lowell Jr., Class of 1854, a businessman before the war who commanded cavalry and was killed at Cedar Creek in October 1864. For each man, however obscure, Higginson sought the same depth: who his people were, where he came from, what he had planned to do with his life. William Lowell Putnam, who had entered Harvard in 1858 without completing his degree, is present; so are men who left no other trace in the public record.
The practical implication for a genealogist is significant. If your ancestor appears in these volumes, you have not just a date and a regiment. You have parents’ names, a place of birth, a social context, and often the names of brothers, uncles, or classmates mentioned in passing.
The Harvard Memorial Biographies were digitised early and are freely available through Archive.org and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Search for the title directly; both volumes are there in full.
The Quinquennial Catalogue: every Harvard graduate since 1642
The Harvard Memorial Biographies covers only the Civil War dead. For the broader alumni record, the essential tool is the Quinquennial Catalogue of Officers and Graduates of Harvard University, published at five-year intervals from the 1870s through to 1930.
Each edition lists every graduate from the first class of 1642 onwards. The entries are terse, graduation year, subsequent occupations, date and place of death, but the cumulative editions allow you to trace a man’s career across multiple updates and, critically, to find when he died. The 1930 edition, which covers graduates through 1929 and is sometimes described loosely as the “pre-1929 record,” is the terminal volume of the series in its original form and the most comprehensive for genealogical purposes.
For researchers whose ancestors graduated between, roughly, 1830 and 1920, the Quinquennial Catalogue is the first port of call. It will tell you whether the man you are looking for actually attended Harvard, when he graduated, and what profession he entered. Multiple digitised editions are held by the HathiTrust Digital Library. The Harvard University Archives also holds the complete series.
Class reports: the biographical record beyond the catalogue
The Quinquennial Catalogue gives you a skeleton. The class reports put flesh on it.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, each Harvard graduating class maintained its own secretarial organisation and published periodic class reports, typically at five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty-year intervals. These volumes asked each surviving member to submit a brief autobiographical statement covering his career, family, and current address. As members died, obituary notices replaced the autobiographical entries.
The result is a remarkable distributed archive. The Class of 1880’s twenty-fifth anniversary report, for example, contains not only the names of surviving members but their occupations, their wives’ names, their children’s names, their places of residence, and, for those already dead, short memoir notices written by classmates who actually knew them. A merchant from Salem, a physician from Worcester, a farmer from western Massachusetts who left no other trace in any published record may appear here with more biographical depth than anywhere else.
The Harvard University Archives holds an extensive collection of class reports under the record group HUD. Coverage is uneven (not every class maintained the practice with equal diligence) but for classes graduating between roughly 1850 and 1920, the collection is substantial. The finding aid is searchable online through the Harvard University Archives catalogue, HOLLIS.
The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine and its necrology sections
In 1892, Harvard launched the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, a quarterly journal aimed at keeping alumni connected to the university. It ran continuously until 1930, thirty-eight years of issues, each containing a necrology section listing alumni who had died in the preceding quarter.
These notices vary in length. Some are a single line. Others run to several paragraphs and name wives, children, and professional achievements. For graduates who died between 1892 and 1930, the Graduates’ Magazine is often the most accessible source of a brief but authenticated biography. The full run is digitised and searchable through HathiTrust; searching a surname alongside “Harvard Graduates’ Magazine” in Google will frequently surface the relevant issue directly.
For researchers working on New England families with Harvard connections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (families whose men went into law, medicine, the ministry, or commerce but who are absent from the famous-alumni literature) the Graduates’ Magazine necrologies are underused. They were written by people who knew the subjects; they are not formal obituaries composed from published sources.
What the archives hold and how to access them
The Harvard University Archives, located in Pusey Library on the Cambridge campus, is the central repository for all of the printed sources described above and for a great deal more. Its collections include the original administrative records of the university (admissions registers, financial accounts, faculty minutes) alongside the printed publications that drew on them.
For remote researchers, the HOLLIS catalogue (library.harvard.edu) provides online access to finding aids and indicates which collections have been digitised. Many of the class reports, Quinquennial Catalogues, and Graduates’ Magazine issues are available through HathiTrust and Archive.org without a Harvard affiliation.
The Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School holds equivalent records for medical graduates, including the printed alumni directories and memorial volumes for the Medical School specifically, which are worth consulting separately if your ancestor’s Harvard connection was through medicine rather than the College.
If you cannot identify a graduate through the printed sources, the Harvard University Archives accepts remote enquiries and can search admissions registers and other manuscript sources not yet digitised. Contact details and the current research enquiry form are on the Archives website.
For New England genealogical context around Harvard records, the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) in Boston holds extensive complementary family history materials that frequently connect to the Harvard alumni record, particularly for Boston, Essex, and Middlesex County families.
Ancestry.com and FindMyPast both hold digitised runs of some Harvard alumni publications, though coverage is partial. For the Quinquennial Catalogue specifically, HathiTrust provides the most reliable full-text access.
Genealogy research note
The published sources described in this article, the Harvard Memorial Biographies, the Quinquennial Catalogue, the class reports, and the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, form a research sequence, not a single lookup. Begin with the Quinquennial Catalogue to establish the graduation year and basic career trajectory. Move from there to the relevant class report for fuller biographical detail. For men who died between 1892 and 1930, check the Graduates’ Magazine necrologies. For Civil War dead, go directly to the Harvard Memorial Biographies.
None of these sources requires payment or a library card to access in digital form. HathiTrust and Archive.org together hold the bulk of the material, and both are free to use. Where your search requires manuscript sources held at Pusey Library, the Harvard University Archives offers a paid research service for those who cannot travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If you are researching a family with Harvard connections over several generations, the class report series will often give you multiple overlapping sources, a father’s class report mentioning a son by name, a son’s class report giving more detail about the father’s career.
Named individuals index for Harvard In Memoriam volumes
| Name | Dates | Role / significance |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas Wentworth Higginson | 1823–1911 | Harvard Class of 1841; editor of Harvard Memorial Biographies (1866); colonel, 1st South Carolina Infantry |
| Robert Gould Shaw | 1837–1863 | Harvard Class of 1860; colonel, 54th Massachusetts Infantry; killed Fort Wagner, July 1863; son of Francis George Shaw and Sarah Blake Sturgis |
| James Jackson Lowell | 1837–1862 | Harvard Class of 1858; lawyer; killed at Glendale, June 1862 |
| Charles Russell Lowell Jr. | 1835–1864 | Harvard Class of 1854; businessman and cavalry commander; killed at Cedar Creek, October 1864 |
| William Lowell Putnam | 1840–1861 | Entered Harvard 1858; killed at Ball’s Bluff, October 1861; did not complete degree |
| Francis George Shaw | 1809–1882 | Father of Robert Gould Shaw; named in the Harvard Memorial Biographies entry for his son |
| Sarah Blake Sturgis (Shaw) | 1815–1902 | Mother of Robert Gould Shaw; named in the memorial notice |
Further reading on Harvard In Memoriam volumes
- Harvard University Archives: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/collections-explorer
- HathiTrust Digital Library (Quinquennial Catalogue and Graduates’ Magazine): hathitrust.org
- Archive.org full text of Harvard Memorial Biographies: archive.org
- New England Historic Genealogical Society: americanancestors.org
- Countway Library of Medicine: countway.harvard.edu
