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Postcard views of Michigan cities and the University of Michigan.

The Michigan Historical Collections postcard collection contains picture postcards of Michigan scenes. The collection was brought together by MHC staff. The postcards depict a large number of Michigan communities, with the largest number of cards relating to Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan, and Detroit.

The postcards are arranged by the name of the town shown in the picture. In cases where names have changed, or for rural places that might be identified with several surrounding towns, the postcards are filed according to the name used on the card. For instance, postcards of the Irish Hills region can be found under that name as well as under the nearby towns of Brooklyn and Onsted.

Outsize postcards are located in Box 12, and a few postcards too large for that box are located with the medium sized photographs in UCCm.

Thomas B. Buell family of Branch County, Michigan. The family was engaged in farming, banking, real estate, and other business enterprises; family history and genealogy; correspondence and other papers of individual Buell family members; records of family banking operations in Union City and Elmira; and papers of Buells attending Olivet College.

The Buell family collection documents the lives and activities of Thomas Bingham Buell (TBB1) and successive generations of sons. The collection is composed mostly of correspondence and business records such as mortgages, contracts, stock certificates, receipts and deeds. The business records and much of the correspondence are valuable for their documentation of the running of a family farm and the operation of a privately-owned bank in 19th and early 20th century Michigan.

Another great value of the collection lies in the personal correspondence and writings of family members. The correspondence and journals of the wives, for example, are especially interesting as most were city bred with no farm experience until after their marriages. And the correspondence between sons and fathers reveals a great deal about the pressures of keeping up the family farm and bank.

The collection, consisting mainly of correspondence and other records of the Buell men, has been divided into nine series: Buell Family, Thomas Bingham Buell (1815-1899), Farmers National Bank, Darius David Buell (1852-1942), Thomas Bingham Buell (1880-1942), Dorr Darius Buell (1882-1920), Elmira Bank of Buell and Wickett, Darius David Buell (1907-1990), and Topical Files. The named series follow sequentially from father to son with the records of the two family banks placed after the papers of the Buell family member first associated with that bank. Because the family was involved so heavily in business dealings both with the farm and the banks, most of the collection in some ways relates to business activities. Thus, family correspondence is often a mixture of personal sentiment and business dealings. In the processing of the collection, files identified as "business" relate only to banking or real estate endeavors. Non-business papers might pertain to both personal and business affairs. Correspondence has generally been grouped by the family member who received it except in cases where it did not make sense to break up groups of related materials, as in the Olivet College subseries of the Darius David Buell (1852-1942) papers.