News Release

Volunteer Ted Hansen Receives Region 1 Hartzog Award Honorable Mention

Ted Hansen with a folder of letters in progress, with archivist Chris Wirth in 2017

NPS / Kate Hanson Plass

News Release Date: June 24, 2020

Contact: Anna Christie, [phone]

The National Park Service Region 1 Volunteers in Parks Program recognized Ted Hansen as a 2020 Honorable Mention for the George and Helen Hartzog Awards for Outstanding Volunteer Service in the Enduring Service category. This is the volunteer program’s “lifetime achievement” award, recognizing lasting impacts of volunteer contributions across many years of dedicated service.

Ted Hansen began volunteering with the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site archival collections in April 2009, working with then-archivist Anita Israel to index correspondence in the collection. Before coming to the site, Ted was a professor in the School of Business at Salem State University and served as president of the Cambridge Historical Society, where he worked with the society's large collection of correspondence of Anne Allegra (Longfellow) Thorp's sister-in-law, Sarah Chapman (Thorp) Bull.

Over eleven years, Ted has been a consistent weekly presence in the site’s research room, logging over 1,500 hours of volunteer time. In total, he has indexed over 2,700 individual letters in the Reverend Samuel Longfellow Papers, Frances Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow Papers, Appleton Family Papers, Alice Mary Longfellow Papers, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Family Papers.

Ted’s particular interest working with the manuscript collection has been to understand and illuminate the social networks and personal experiences documented in the correspondence of the Longfellow family. As Ted works, he interrogates the context and content of letters with an enduring curiosity that is inspiring. “Working with Ted is a delight," said retired archivist Chris Wirth. "He shares his insights and questions and I have learned a great deal from him about these people whose letters he is reading. He tries to tease out different correspondents’ relationships and understand the subtexts of what they are saying.” The result has been a rich resource, which rangers at the site have drawn on to inform their tours, programs, and writing, grounding their interpretation in rich primary source material on the Civil War, abolition, suffrage, women’s education, and more.

The item-level finding aids that Ted has created have also benefited outside scholars coming to conduct research in the collection. The indexes to the Fanny Longfellow correspondence and Samuel Longfellow correspondence have been used by authors writing on art history, literature, religious history, and the Longfellow family, and will continue to help researchers use the resource in the future.

The staff of Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site congratulates Ted on this recognition and thanks him for his continuing dedicated service.