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Paper Ghosts
The Ephemeral Legacy of the Thomas Whaley Family
January/February 2024
 The earliest known photograph of the Whaley House, taken c. 1872. Courtesy SOHO collection
The history of the Thomas Whaley family and the 1857 Whaley House Museum in Old Town San Diego has been well documented over the past century. However, the scope and provenance of the Whaley family records used for the 1950s restoration and interpretation of the historic two-story brick structure seems as mysterious as the reputed ghosts haunting the 167-year-old home.
The “Whaley Papers” came to public attention in the December 27, 1957 edition of the San Diego Union, which revealed the existence of what was estimated to be 18,000 letters belonging to the family.
New York native Thomas Whaley and his family were prolific letter writers and savers of correspondence, and household, business, and sentimental ephemera. Decades of this practice grew into more than a century’s worth of material. The collection dates from 1819 to 1953, and pertains to six generations of the immediate and extended Whaley family.
What does this collection consist of? Personal and business letters, journals, letterpress books, books, booklets, magazines, telegrams, business ledgers, legal documents, deeds, leases, stock certificates, budgets, medical bills, prescriptions, receipts, inventories, grocery lists, recipes, due bills, dunning letters, banking records, notes, autograph albums, photograph albums, photographs, photographic negatives, business cards, calling cards, greeting cards, library cards, report cards, valentines, invitations, theater programs, newspapers, newspaper clippings, advertisements, patent and copyright applications, appointment books, address books, doodles, artwork, scrapbooks, hundreds of torn-away sides of book jackets, penciled with literary quotes, essays, short story and manuscript drafts, sheet music, original songs, copies of published songs, music inventories, original poems, copies of published poems, celebrity ephemera, and hundreds of empty envelopes addressed to various members of the family.
As one would expect, the bulk of the correspondence in the collection was sent to the Whaleys from outside parties. And the letters the Whaley’s sent to extended family, friends, business acquaintances, and immediate family are absent in the collection. (Some letters they sent into the world can be found in external collections, such as the Ephraim W. Morse Family Papers, which are held at the special collections library at UC San Diego.)
Corinne Lillian Whaley, the youngest of Thomas and Anna Whaley’s six children and their last survivor, held the deed to the Whaley House and owned its contents, including the Whaley Papers. Upon Lillian’s death in 1953, several heirs to the estate received a specific portion of the Whaley Papers. At the time, the heirs were parents and grandparents, whose progeny, and their progeny’s descendants, would eventually inherit smaller batches of the papers. As is typical with most estate distributions, the terms would further divide the papers as each beneficiary passed on.
At the time of Miss Lillian Whaley’s death, 13 local citizens formed the Historical Shrine Foundation (HSF) to save the Whaley House.
At the encouragement of the HSF, the County of San Diego purchased the Whaley House in September 1956 to preserve the home and open it to the public as a museum. At this time the county Board of Supervisors appointed the HSF (eventually selected as the first steward of the Whaley House Museum) as an advisory committee to help oversee the house’s restoration, which would take several years to complete.
When news of the project was made public, one of the Whaley heirs contacted the HSF to offer research assistance by allowing temporary access to the batch of the Whaley Papers for the site’s restoration and interpretation.
The beneficiaries obtained legal representation to ensure continued family ownership of the original papers, as well as the ability to censor personal information they wanted to keep private. Then they entrusted the HSF with the custody and care of the material during the time necessary to have the papers indexed and copied; after that, they were to be returned to the owners.
The HSF hired a micrographics company to create a microfilm record of the loaned material. After that was accomplished, the original material was eventually returned to the estate beneficiaries. The microfilm copies, however, were HSF property.
When the county’s lease with the HSF expired in 2000, Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO) became the steward of the Whaley House. The original Whaley Papers remained with their owners. The HFS retained its microfilmed copies the existence of which was publicly unknown.
During the early years of SOHO’s museum operations, a person wishing to remain anonymous donated a set of the microfilm copies to SOHO. We digitized the microfilm and made it available to the public for the very first time on SOHO’s discontinued Whaley House Museum website. The Whaley Family Special Library Collection can now be found online.
In 2012, a Whaley family member contacted SOHO wishing to donate his beneficiary share of the Whaley Papers to the organization. He made this donation with the explicit instructions that these would never be given to the County of San Diego. Donors often make special requests.
These papers date from a later period in Whaley family life and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, had not been microfilmed by the HSF. The donation also included a few pieces of family furniture and personal effects, along with family photos, which were made public in SOHO’s book, The History and Mystery of the Whaley House in 2016.
SOHO’s lease with the county expired in 2020, and stewardship of the Whaley House Museum was awarded to a for-profit entity. At that time, SOHO reached out to the family to determine their ultimate wishes for the future of their donation under these unanticipated circumstances.
The family confirmed their wishes that the donation remain in SOHO’s possession and honor the original requirements.
Recently, upon the advice of the first donor, a second Whaley heir made another donation of a separate batch of papers, evidence of the trust SOHO engenders through its close relationship with the family.
There is no known original, complete inventory of the family records to establish what if anything might be missing from the entirety of the Whaley Papers. What is certain is that historically relevant portions have been reunited thanks to the generosity of the two Whaley descendants' donations to SOHO, and that this material will never again be separated.
The collection is currently being cataloged and digitized by SOHO’s historians who are the most knowledgeable authorities on Whaley history. When this project is completed, SOHO will donate the collection to an educational public archive. Ultimately, the public archive and SOHO’s website will ensure the greatest accessibility to the Whaley Papers for decades to come.
SOHO is honored to have been entrusted with original documents by the descendants of Thomas and Anna Whaley and to serve as the Whaley Papers’ temporary steward. We will ensure the collection’s preservation for history lovers, students, and historians alike, for decades to come.
SOHO welcomes donations for cataloging and digitizing the Whaley Papers.
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