Everyone named

I. What this is

The rest of this section argues that the people who built and ran these houses were not recorded. This page is the list of the ones who were.

Everybody here is named in a source this site has looked at directly — a directory entry checked against the page image, a caption on a photograph, a signature in the corner of a drawing, a line of hand lettering on the back of a mount. Nobody here is inferred. Where a source printed a person’s name and workplace and no occupation, the trade column is blank, because that is what the record says.

The name links to the story where the person appears. The last column links, where it can, to the volume itself, reproduced page by page on this site.

II. The list

A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P Q R S T V W Z

III. What is not here

Two things, and they are both larger than the table above.

The first is the thousands of people who are listed without being written about. The 1923–’25 South Berkshire volume alone yields 2,329 service and trade entries across ten towns, and they are published on this site as a single data file for anyone who wants to work with them. The 1926 Central Berkshire volume, which covers Lenox, has not been parsed whole. A page like this one is a reading list, not a census.

The second is everybody the record simply did not keep. A hundred and more men sitting on the rubble in front of Shadow Brook, and not one name. Forty-two painters on a lower rail at Blantyre. Seventeen of the twenty-eight people at Elm Court, with nothing after the name but the house. The kitchens and the laundries almost entirely. 24 of the 164 people on this page are women, which is not a fact about who did the work — and the ones who are here are mostly here because of two pages of the 1910 census, which names servants the directories never record at all.

That is the shape of the thing. This page will get longer as the section does, and it will never stop being the small end of the problem.

Directory entries from Crowley & Lunt, South Berkshire Directory, 1923–’25, and from the Central Berkshire County Directory for 1926 and 1929, reproduced page by page here and here; names and trades are given as printed, and the spellings are the books’. Photograph captions and annotations quoted as catalogued by the Lenox Library Association, via Digital Commonwealth. Drawing signatures and title blocks quoted exactly as lettered, from Olmsted job files at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service. Each person’s entry in the source, and what is known about them, is in the story linked from the name.