Wedding Announcement Collection

Overview

The Wedding Announcement Collection is a single Victorian‑era social document created on August 28, 1888. It consists of a scanned JPEG image of a printed announcement made by Mrs. Luther C. Clark, announcing the marriage of her niece, Lena Townsend Crawford, to Mr. Macgrane Coxe. The item is housed in the Alice Austen House Museum’s digital archives and is catalogued under the subject headings “Weddings,” “Marriage announcements,” “Social life,” and “Victorian era.”

Background

Mrs. Luther C. Clark, the announcer, was a resident of Southfield, Orange County, New York. The announcement was produced for public circulation in the local community and later digitised for the Alice Austen House’s archival collection. The Alice Austen House, located on Staten Island, preserves a wide range of nineteenth‑century documents related to the social and cultural life of the region.

Contents

The collection contains one image file (1888_8‑28‑Aug 1002 copy.jpg) in JPEG format, 415 KB in size. The image reproduces the full text of the announcement:

> “Mrs. Luther C. Clark announces the marriage of her niece Lena Townsend Crawford, to Mr. Macgrane Coxe, at Southfield, Orange Co., N.Y., on Tuesday, August twenty‑eighth, 1888.”

The scanned image preserves the original typography and layout, including the date, location, and names of the bride, groom, and announcer. No additional correspondence, photographs, or related documents are included in this collection.

Scope

The collection covers a single event: the 1888 wedding of Lena Townsend Crawford and Mr. Macgrane Coxe. It is geographically limited to Southfield, Orange County, New York, and temporally confined to the date of the announcement (August 28, 1888). The collection does not include any ancillary materials such as invitations, photographs of the wedding, or subsequent correspondence. It provides a snapshot of Victorian‑era social customs surrounding marriage announcements in a small New York community.