Extracting History from the Everyday: A Conversation about Shopping Stories with Molly Kerr

What will historians in the future glean from our receipts from Home Depot or from Home Depot’s own business records? That we don’t know, but Molly Kerr and colleagues have found a way to mine the business accounts of the past—specifically, the ledgers and some letters of the 18th century Virginia businesses of John Glassford & Company and Robert Townsend Hooe and his associates.

Molly is one of the founding directors of History Revealed, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to uncovering the lives of lesser-known individuals and groups. Through historic documents, artifacts, buildings, and the landscape, they aim to “connect the dots of information in search of the larger story.”

In March, I volunteered at one of HRI’s periodic Transcribe-a-Thons conducted in partnership with Alexandria Archaeology. Intrigued, I asked her more about the project, called Shopping Stories.

A timely P.S.! As we went back and forth on this post, another Transcribe-a-Thon was announced for July 19 at Lloyd House in Alexandria. An enticement is to taste some of the teas listed in the ledgers. You can email Alexandria Archaeology to RSVP or for more information.

Q: How do you quickly describe Shopping Stories?

A: Shopping Stories is a crowd-sourced, public history project to digitize, transcribe, and publish eighteenth-century merchant accounts.

Q: What gave you the idea to undertake it, and when?

 A: HRI launched the project as an expansion of a transcribing effort initially undertaken in 2011 by George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Fairfax County Park Authority. It focused on the ledgers of John Glassford & Company for stores in Alexandria and Colchester, Virginia, with an attempt to inform archaeological research work being conducted by both organizations. 

 More recently, we’ve begun to transcribe the ledgers of Robert Townsend Hooe and his associates over time. Robert Townsend Hooe got his start in Alexandria 1770 coming from Port Tobacco, Maryland, and continued as a merchant in Alexandria into the early 19th century.

Q: What is a ledger and why transcribe them?

A page from a ledger and the transcription created for it.

A: Like today, 18th-century businesses needed a way to keep track of their transactions.  These records comprised a series of books from scribbles kept at the moment (like receipts), a daily log of all the transactions (similar to an end of day cash register close-out), and an end of the year summary of every transaction.  Each provides similar information, just in different ways. Most often surviving to the present are the daily log and the summary volume.  The daily log, or journal, gives us by day, the order each customer entered the store and what they purchased or how they provided payment, as well as who made the purchase/payment. The end of the year summary, or ledger, gives us a summarized list of all transactions by a specific customer. The ledger was the legal document a business would use as evidence in court should a customer be delinquent in payment or for any other reason.

The simple answer to why transcribe them is that they provide access to the people (through account holders and shoppers), popular and necessary things (through purchases), places (through notations about the people and purchases), and events (either directly mentioned or inferred through what is purchased) of a community. Business ledgers are an underutilized primary source that provide a wealth of information that reveal insights into the lives of the less prominent members of a community, including women and the enslaved, once you get beyond the structure of the pages. 

Q: What have you learned about shopping in 18th century Alexandria—e.g., a few large stores and/or lots of small? Were there fixed prices?

 A: Just like today, shopping in 18th-century Alexandria was competitive with several stores operating simultaneously; we know there were upwards of four or five stores in the small community of Colchester [in present-day Lorton, Virginia] in the early 1760s!

The American Revolution reset access to inventory, making merchants operate in a more speculative way, often selling merchandise directly from harbored ships rather than behind the counter in a store. Pricing depended on accessibility, length of time goods remained on the shelves, how you paid for the goods, and whether you had a relationship with the merchant, either in person or through a friend or relative. Being able to give specific numbers to specific goods is one of the reasons we want to publish the transcripts in a database – to allow for these kinds of comparisons.

Both stores sold a large range of items. Glassford stores focused mostly on the daily goods needed by small farmers from tools to fabrics to spices. Early on, Hooe’s stores sold similar goods to Glassford, but as time passed, the store became more like a bank moving money between customers, providing us a glimpse of the community and its relationships.

 Q: How did the stores obtain the goods they sold? Were there wholesalers like we would recognize today?

 A: The John Glassford & Company stores in Virginia and Maryland ordered and acquired goods through their primary company in Glasgow, Scotland. The store managers submitted their orders to the company, and as today, would get sent what the company thought they needed – which wasn’t always the same thing.

Alexander Henderson, the store manager in Colchester, often complained to Glassford about the goods he was sent. For example, in one letter, he said, “The Complaints of the Shooes sent Sir for these two Years have been so great & frequent that I cannot help taking notice of it again.  I therefore begg that particular care may be taken in chusing these. The Kilmarnock Shoes are intolerably bad.” (All spelling from the original, contained in Henderson Letterbook, Scheme 1760, page 28a, at the Local History/Special Collections, Alexandria Public Library.)

It does take good eyes, but here is where store manager Alexander Henderon lodges his complaint about the quality of the shoes sent him to sell.

As the Hooe stores operated independently, they required relationships with multiple suppliers to provide the goods needed. Letters and invoices show how Hooe and his partners worked with suppliers throughout Europe and the Caribbean to source goods for sale.  

Based on what we can learn from the invoices, both Alexandria stores occasionally acted as local wholesalers selling large quantities of goods for others to sell elsewhere, as well as undertook to purchase saleable goods at low prices for themselves and then had mark-ups for retail costs based on the availability of goods, payment process (cash or credit), and relationship with the customer. 

Q: Do you have a favorite example(s) of discovery?

 A: I’ll confess this is a tough one because there are so many small threads that can be pulled to learn about the Alexandria community. If we look at items purchased, while there were certainly unique things like violins and carriages, I hadn’t really thought about how what was purchased could alone hint at a story. Like the sale of bombasine and alamode being primarily purchased as mourning fabrics; Captain William Bronaugh purchased them from the Colchester store after the death of his wife and mother in 1761. While it took digging through other records to learn who had died, seeing evidence that someone had died based on the purchase of specific fabrics surprised me.

Or, the discovery of city residents who otherwise don’t appear in the records, like an enslaved man named L’Amour. We can track his approximate arrival to be hired out by the Alexandria store around 1778/1779 through the 1780s. L’Amour played a role in the recovery of guns seized from Mount Vernon and was manumitted by Richard Harrison in 1791 (both details had been noted by the George Washington Papers), but the ledgers allow us to learn more about L’Amour’s daily life in Alexandria. 

Q: Beyond the occasional “a-ha” moment, how do you see making use of the more common routine entries?

A: Those routine entries may be a little boring to a transcriber, but they can provide insight into overall store practices. The hope is to be able to track, over time, the different types of purchases and payments in a more macro way. By adding up all the “Totals” over time, we’ll be able to get a better sense of the amount of money moving into and out of the stores by customer, by place, and types of goods. 

Q: Roughly how many pages have been transcribed, and what is there still to do? What does a transcriber do?

A: Between the John Glassford & Company and more recently acquired Hooe-related accounts, we have already transcribed nearly 8,000 of the over 10,000 pages between the two collections.  The project has involved more than 450 students and interested individuals in partnership with universities and Alexandria Archaeology.

Currently, work focuses on transcribing the ledgers or letters of the Hooe-related materials. Transcribers go to the website From the Page to select the type of document they’d like to transcribe from the Shopping Stories project. For the ledgers, we use a template to transfer the pages into a format similar to a spreadsheet with each bit of information from the original having a home in the template. For the letters, transcribers input the letter into a text box. We provide instructions for each and have a running glossary and abbreviation list of (un)commonly found words found in the documents to help.  From the Page helps transcribers find pages that need work or they can select a page based on date (for the journals) or account holder (for the ledgers). They can spend as little or as much time as needed to work on each page before saving and moving on to the next story to be found.

The primary effort behind the scenes has been to edit the transcriptions and investigate ways to publish the transcripts to make them accessible to the public and allow for analysis. As you can imagine, streamlining all these documents into a compatible format and standardization of words is an ongoing and immense undertaking.  

Q:  You were focused on ledgers, now letters have come into the picture. How did you find them, and what is the goal with that part of the project?

A: The addition of the letters to our transcribing efforts is an extension of the collection of material associated with Hooe and his associates found at the New York Public Library.  The Hooe & Harrison letterbook was included as part of its “Virginia. Alexandria. Hooe & Harrison” collection. Given that these letters cover primarily a period of time when no ledgers survive, our hope is they will provide insight into the happenings at the store during that period without the financial transaction records.   

Transcribe-A-Thon at Lloyd House in Alexandria. I am way at the back, working on letters.

Over the last four years, History Revealed received a series of grants and fellowships from the Historic Alexandria Foundation and the Omohundro Institute to photograph and publish twelve ledgers, journals, daybooks, an invoice book, and a letterbook found at the New York Public Library, as well as a journal (from the Hooe store) from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

We’ve also been exploring ways to publish the transcripts online through a partnership with the University of Central Florida. 

Q: How can people get involved to transcribe?

A: While our focus has been on recruiting and working with transcribers through a partnership with Alexandria Archaeology, the Shopping Stories project is open to anyone interested in volunteering to transcribe. We encourage anyone who is interested in volunteering with us to check out the project through From the Page:  https://fromthepage.com/historyrevealed. We also hope to have another group transcribe-a-thon later in 2025. [As noted above, now scheduled for July 19, 2025.]