Research: Joseph McAleenan

She began with McAleenan. The name “McAleenan” seemed relatively unique, at least in the United States. Upon searching “Joseph A. McAleenan” and “Joseph McAleenan” online, there were immediately promising results, including listings of rare booksellers auctioning and selling other books someone with the same name had written.

Wondering if any published books (not necessarily by him) mention his name, she searched in Google Books and, sure enough, there were a number of results–a few contemporary books and many from the early twentieth century, including in the Explorers Club Journals, bulletins from the New York Zoological Society (NYZS), and Fordham University. One of the results, a 1916 Journal of American History, volume 10, listed a Joseph McAleenan as being a lifetime member of the Sons of St. Patrick, an associate member of the Explorers Club, and a member of the New York Zoological Society.

From the contemporary books, which made portions of the text available, she could derive that a Joseph McAleenan has been on hunting trips led by Jimmy Simpson and was accompanied by Harlow Brooks, John Murgaroyed, Robert Frothingham, Carl Rungis (?), Ambrose Means, and E. Sanborn, who would prove to be compelling characters (CITATION). There was also mention of the Campfire Club, which would prove significant. “There’s something to all this,” she thought to herself, and, like the explorer in Kipling’s poem, she would be compelled to go further and “look beyond the ranges” to find that what this “something” is is a story of a time, a place, and a culture….. Collecting sources like trophies

Of course, she has to answer the question: Is this all the same Joseph McAleenan she was looking for?

She went to the New York Times (NTY) historical database to find his obituary, having learned that the McAleenan she has discovered was from New York. There, she discovered that a Joseph A. McAleenan died in 1926. He was described as being “an example of Catholic manhood,” having played a major leadership role in “the organization and development of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York” and mentioned that he was a member of the Sons of St. Patrick, an alumnus of Fordham University, and, most notably, a very important name appeared, Patrick Hayes, who was mentioned as the president of the Board of Trustees of Catholic Charities (NYT 1926).

Name Joseph Austin McAleenan

This very much seemed to be the Joseph A. McAleenan she was looking for, especially given the Hayes connection. Additional searches in the NYT and discoveries made in other sources confirmed she was correct. Some of those sources were at the Explorers Club archive; she found not just McAleenan’s membership information, but also two of his hunting trip companions, Harlow Brooks and Robert Frothingham.

What the Explorer would come to learn from a wide range of sources was that McAleenan and his hunting party friends would hunt with both rifle and camera. The latter being a move toward conservation and an indication of the growing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century, including for scientific purposes. There was no greater evidence of this point than what she would discover to be one of McAleenan’s published works, Hunting with Rifle and Camera in the Canadian Rockies (DATE), which she would see while conducting research Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies archive. How she found the archive, and the many other archives she visited is its is part of …. story.

Research Trails: Digital Resources

Spreadsheet of resources…

HathiTrust

She went to HathiTrust, [explain]. Being a richer resource than Google Books and much easier to navigate, read, and the links are stable, meaning I wasn’t going to find a link no longer worked a year later. I relocated the same sources I had found from the NYZS, Explorers Club, Fordham, and other texts and saved the links. I also found new sources and began to search for what I refer to as McAleenan’s hunting party: Harlow Brooks, Robert Forthingham, and John Murgatroyd. Among the materials I found for each were: NYZS, medical, and Explorers Club publications for Brooks; advertising trade magazines, The Log (the Circumnavigators’ Club magazine), and Explorers Club publications for Frothingham; Fur Trade magazine for Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd also appeared in Field and Stream as did all of the others with further exploration. This proved to be a major breakthrough in my research.
Take aways: …

Sons of St Patrick

Fordham University

Internet Archive

Like with Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive (IA)… some of the materials are the same, though they are easier to read Hath

New York Times

Bibliography

Bibliography
I went back to the rare book seller listings and used WorldCat [explain] to see if I could put together a bibliography of McAleenan’s books and identify the obvious predominant theme of the outdoors, and that most are published diaries. There was:
Diary of the Wyoming Bear Hunt (1914), Press of P.J. Collison & Co.
Through Yellowstone Park and Elk Hunting in Wyoming (1914), The Knickerbocker Press, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
The History of the Irish Wolfdog (1917), Reprinted by H.S. Nichols; originally printed in Dublin 1897
Diary Kept by Joseph McAleenan of a Cruise for Sword-Fish in the Month of July, 1916 (1922), published by H.S. Nichols
Leaves from a Wyoming Diary (1924), published by H.S. Nichols
Hunting with Rifle and Camera in the Canadian Rockies (1924), published by H.S. Nichols
Grand Canyon Trails (1924), published by H.S. Nichols
The Explorer (1924), published by H.S. Nichols

She returned to the rare book seller listings and used WorldCat, an online catalog for searching across US libraries and beyond, to find the other books McAleenan had published.

[explain] to see if I could put together a bibliography of McAleenan’s books and identify the obvious predominant theme of the outdoors, and that most are published diaries.

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Summary of research threads – at the end of each research related page (include libraries and archives pages)