Edward Holker Welch, SJ Papers
Collection
Identifier: GTM-GAMMS51
The Edward Holker Welch, SJ Papers contain personal journals as well as both spiritual and secular writings.
The Edward Holker Welch, SJ Papers are on deposit at Georgetown University and are the property of the USA East Province of the Society of Jesus. As stewards of the Archives, the Georgetown University Library’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections is responsible for managing access to the material based on policies set forth by the USA East Province. Researchers may view these materials in the Reading Room of the Booth Family Center for Special Collections. General policies for using Special Collections can be found here.
Access to the Archives is governed by the USA East Province and is subject to all Library and Special Collections policies and procedures in addition to the specific guidelines below. These guidelines are a summary of access policies; the Archives may include materials that fall outside the scope of these general guidelines. For information on access to specific materials, please contact the Special Collections staff.
Guidelines:
1. All Archives materials dated or bearing solely on events occurring before January 1, 1940, shall be open for review unless otherwise restricted, subject to Library policies and procedures.
2. All unpublished Archives materials dated or bearing solely on events occurring on or after January 1, 1940, shall be open for review upon request subject to a decision by the Provincial or someone designated by the Provincial.
3. Researchers may quote from the materials.
4. Researchers may take their own photographs of the material for scholarly and research purposes. Allowing photographs is not an authorization to publish or to deposit the material in another library or archive.
5. Written permission from the USA East Province is required for the publication of substantive portions of any material or publication-quality reproductions of any material.
6. Material not yet processed is not available to researchers; permission will not be granted to access any unprocessed material.
7. Audiovisual, microfilm and other material in the Archives, the original of which is held in another archive, may be consulted and transcribed only. Written permission from the archive holding the original material is required for any duplication, reproduction, or publication of that material.
8. Use the Permission Request Form to request permission (i) to access any restricted processed material or (ii) to publish reproductions or quote substantive portions of the material. Send the completed form by email to the Booth Family Center for Special Collections (speccoll@georgetown.edu).
Researchers are solely responsible for determining the copyright status of the materials being used, establishing who the copyright owner is, locating the copyright owner, and obtaining permission for intended use.
Edward Holker Welch (1822-1904) was born in Boston to Francis (1776-1867) and Margaret Crease Stackpole Welch (1784-1830). He grew up Protestant, attending Old South Church as a child, and studied at Boston Latin School before enrolling at Harvard and graduating with a BA (1840). He then studied jurisprudence in Heidelberg, Germany (1840-1845), and subsequently returned to the US where he converted to Catholicism and enrolled once more at Harvard as a law student (MA and LLB, 1846). In 1846 he travelled to Issy, France, where he entered a Sulpician seminary and was ordained.
By 1851 he had entered the Society of Jesus at Frederick (1851-1852), after which he was stationed at Georgetown University (1853-1855, 1858-1861) teaching modern language as well as logic and metaphysics; the College of Baltimore (1856); Frederick (1857), where he was socius to the master of novices; College of the Holy Cross (1862); and Boston College (1863-1864), where he was a preacher at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. He completed his tertianship in Laon, France, in 1865 and took his final vows in 1866. Thereafter he was again stationed at Boston College (1868-1878, 1881-1886); Georgetown (1879-1880, 1888-1891, 1895-1904); Holy Cross (1887, 1892); and Woodstock (1893-1894). In his later years at Georgetown he was a lecturer in constitutional history and was in charge of domestic and community exhortations.
2.4 Cubic Feet (6 boxes)
English
Latin
The collection was previously part of the University Archives (prior to 1970) and were originally transferred to the Archives after Fr. Welch's death in 1904 (see correspondence from Fr. Edward I. Devitt in the John Corbett, SJ Papers on Edward H. Welch, SJ)
Materials collected and written by John T. Corbett, SJ for a proposed monograph on Fr. Welch were removed from this collection during reprocessing in June 2024. They are now in the John Corbett, SJ Papers on Edward H. Welch, SJ (GTM-0042).
Part of the Georgetown University Manuscripts Repository