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On the evening of 1 September 1795, twenty-one Harvard juniors gathered in the college room of a student named Nymphas Hatch. They were there to found a society. The declared purpose, written into the first minutes of what would become the Hasty Pudding Club, was “to cherish feelings of friendship and patriotism.” The practical requirement was simpler: each member, called upon in alphabetical order at successive meetings, was to bring a pot of hasty pudding, the cornmeal porridge that was then a standard of New England domestic life. Moses Adams brought the first pot. Daniel Bates brought the second. The minutes recorded every name, in order, from the beginning for Harvards oldest student societies.
Those minutes survive. They are held at Harvard University Archives, partially transcribed through the FromThePage platform, and accessible to any researcher who looks for them. For genealogists with New England roots, they are among the most specific and underused sources in the entire Harvard collection. Harvard’s oldest student societies left records that reach back to the 1790s with a precision that most institutional archives cannot match. What follows is an account of how those societies began, what records they created, and where those records now sit.
The room where it began: founding the Hasty Pudding
The twenty-one men who gathered in Hatch’s room in September 1795 were not, for the most part, men history would remember independently. Horace Binney went on to become one of Philadelphia’s most prominent lawyers and declined appointment to the Supreme Court. John Collins Warren became a Boston surgeon of considerable distinction, later central to the founding of Massachusetts General Hospital. But most of the founding members – Joseph Hurd, Jabez Kimball, Leonard Mellen, Benjamin Wood, William Jenks, Daniel Appleton White – left records only in the places that were paying attention at the time: the club minutes, the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue, the Boston city directories, and the probate courts of Middlesex and Suffolk counties.
That is precisely what makes the records valuable. A researcher who knows that an ancestor named Kimball or Mellen or Jenks attended Harvard in the 1790s and finds his name in the Hasty Pudding’s first volume of minutes has found something that no census and no parish register could supply: evidence of friendship, of social position, of the specific room in a Cambridge dormitory where he spent a September evening in 1795. The early minutes record not just names but offices held, fines levied for missing meetings, and the rotation of pudding-bringing duties. They are, in effect, a social ledger of a very specific cohort of young New England men at a very specific moment.
The Porcellian: the older and more guarded club
Four years before Hatch’s gathering, a smaller and more exclusive society had already taken root at Harvard. The Porcellian Club traces its origin to 1791, though its formal organisation is generally dated to 1794. Its earliest name was the Argonauts. The symbolism that replaced it, a pig’s head and the Epicurean motto Dum vivimus vivamus (while we live, let us live), was adopted in the early years of the club’s formal existence and has persisted ever since.
Joseph McKean, later a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, is consistently identified in the club’s own centennial history as one of its earliest figures. The catalogue published to mark the club’s centennial in 1891 lists members from 1791 onward, including men who served as grand marshals, secretaries, and committee officers: Charles Cutler, Francis Dana Channing, Samuel Phillips Prescott Fay, David Stoddard Greenough, Edward Hutchinson Robbins, Theodore Lyman, and Kirk Boott among the earlier generations; Wendell Phillips, John Collins Warren, and Samuel Parkman among those active in the decades that followed. Several of these names recur across Boston’s other institutional records: the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the early boards of Massachusetts General Hospital.
The club grew more exclusive as it aged. By the mid-nineteenth century it was routinely described as the apex of Harvard’s social hierarchy, and its membership had become self-reinforcing: the sons of members were likely to be members themselves. Theodore Roosevelt was elected during his undergraduate years, as were a number of figures prominent in Boston law, finance, and medicine. The centennial catalogue’s membership list, running to 1891, names several hundred individuals with sufficient biographical detail to serve as a reliable genealogical finding aid for families connected to Harvard’s social elite across the club’s first century.
What Harvards oldest student societies records actually contain
The Hasty Pudding’s earliest records, covering 1795 to approximately 1801, are held in Harvard University Archives as part of collection HUD 3447. The first volume of minutes has been partially transcribed and is accessible through the FromThePage collaborative transcription platform hosted by Harvard Library. The transcription is incomplete but advancing, and the original volume can be consulted in person at the Archives. Subsequent volumes covering the nineteenth century are held in the same collection and document membership through officer elections, fine records, and meeting minutes that sometimes include personal detail unavailable anywhere else.
The Porcellian Club’s centennial catalogue, published in 1891 and covering membership from 1791 to that date, is available in full through archive.org. It lists members by year of election with their subsequent degrees, occupations, and dates of death where known by 1891. This makes it a remarkably useful retrospective biographical register for the hundred-year period it covers. The catalogue is the work the club produced for its own historical purposes, not a document designed for genealogists, but it functions as one. A researcher who finds a family surname in the catalogue can use the biographical notes to connect the club membership to a Harvard class year, and from there to the Quinquennial Catalogue, and from there to the matriculation register.
The families these records connect
Both clubs recruited heavily from the same social networks: Boston Brahmin families, Salem maritime dynasties, Cambridge ministerial lineages, and the professional families that supplied Harvard with its students across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Bowditch, Warren, Lyman, Perkins, Appleton, Sturgis, Brimmer, Parkman, and Eliot families appear across both club rosters and across the wider Harvard alumni record. These are not obscure names; they are well documented in Boston city directories, Suffolk and Middlesex County probate records, newspaper archives, and the records of institutions the same men went on to found or govern.
The value of the club records is not that they identify famous people, though some of the members were eventually famous. The value is that they identify the less famous members of famous families, and the entirely unfamous members of families that mattered locally but left few other traces. A junior from a Salem merchant family who joined the Hasty Pudding in 1797, brought his pot of pudding in alphabetical rotation, paid his fines, attended his meetings, and then returned to Salem to run the family business may appear in no national record. He appears in the club minutes.
Genealogy research note
The primary repository for both clubs’ archival records is Harvard University Archives, located in Pusey Library at Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Hasty Pudding Club Records (HUD 3447) include the original minute books from 1795 onward, treasurer’s books, membership catalogues, and later correspondence. Access to the original volumes requires an appointment with the reading room; the Archives’ online catalogue describes the collection’s extent and arrangement. The FromThePage transcription project, hosted at fromthepage.com under the Harvard Library account, has made portions of the earliest volumes available online, and the transcription work is ongoing.
The Porcellian Club centennial catalogue of 1891 is freely available through archive.org and can be searched by surname. This is the appropriate starting point for any Porcellian research. If a name appears there, the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue (also available through archive.org and Harvard University Archives) will supply the class year and degree, allowing the researcher to move into the university’s own matriculation and academic records.
Harvard University Archives more broadly holds student files, class books, and society records that complement the club records. Researchers who identify an ancestor in a club membership list should then search the alumni files and the annual Harvard University Catalogue, published continuously from 1802, which recorded students by class and name in each year of publication. The Massachusetts State Archives in Boston and the Suffolk County Probate Court records (increasingly digitised through Probate Quest and FamilySearch) can supply the family context that the club records suggest but do not directly document. The Boston Athenaeum’s membership records, now partially digitised, will identify whether club members were also Athenaeum proprietors, a common overlap among Boston Brahmin families of this period.
Researchers with Ancestry or Findmypast subscriptions will find digitised Boston city directories and some Massachusetts probate indices on both platforms. For the New England maritime families that supplied several Hasty Pudding and Porcellian members, the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s database (AmericanAncestors.org) holds collections not available elsewhere, including family papers donated by descendants of many of the surnames that appear in these club records.
Named individuals index for Harvards oldest student societies
| Name | Dates | Role / connection |
|---|---|---|
| Nymphas Hatch | fl. 1795 | Harvard junior in whose room the Hasty Pudding Club was founded, 1 September 1795 |
| Moses Adams | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795; first to bring the required pot of pudding |
| Daniel Bates | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795 |
| Horace Binney | 1780-1875 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795; later prominent Philadelphia lawyer; declined appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court |
| Joseph Hurd | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795 |
| Jabez Kimball | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795 |
| Leonard Mellen | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795 |
| John Collins Warren | 1778-1856 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795; also listed in Porcellian membership records; surgeon and co-founder of Massachusetts General Hospital |
| Benjamin Wood | fl. 1795 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795 |
| William Jenks | 1778-1866 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795; later Congregationalist minister and biblical scholar |
| Daniel Appleton White | 1776-1861 | Founding member of the Hasty Pudding Club, 1795; later judge and civic figure, Salem, Massachusetts |
| Joseph McKean | 1776-1818 | Early Porcellian Club figure; later Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard; the McKean Gate (1901) commemorates him |
| Francis Dana Channing | fl. 1790s | Early Porcellian member, listed in centennial catalogue |
| Samuel Phillips Prescott Fay | 1778-1856 | Early Porcellian member; judge; Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Theodore Lyman | 1792-1849 | Porcellian member; later mayor of Boston |
| Wendell Phillips | 1811-1884 | Porcellian member; later Boston abolitionist and reformer |
| Samuel Parkman | fl. early 19th c. | Porcellian member; Boston Brahmin family associated with Massachusetts General Hospital |
| Theodore Roosevelt | 1858-1919 | Porcellian member during Harvard undergraduate years, class of 1880; later 26th President of the United States |
Further reading on Harvards oldest student societies
Archive.org – Porcellian Club centennial catalogue (1891)
fromthepage.com – for the partial transcription of Hasty Pudding Club Records volume 1, 1795-1800
Harvard University Archives – primary repository for both clubs’ records
AmericanAncestors.org – New England Historic Genealogical Society for family papers and New England maritime family records connected to early club membership
Massachusetts State Archives (sec.state.ma.us/arc) — for probate and vital records of the families identified in club rosters
