the Edwards Street Home

Casefiles of the Edwards Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery in Worcester, MA - a charity shelter for indigent women and children and a "nursery" child care center for poor working parents. This exhibit showcases transcribed casefiles from the Home's records. The time period is the 1910s and 1920s, and the home provided temporary housing and low-cost or free child care in some of Worcester's most troubled neighborhoods in those years.

The home's social workers, especially its indefatigable director, kept meticulous handwritten files on each family, which offer a rich cache of primary source materials for the study of immigration and social history of the city. The casefiles in this exhibit were transcribed and analyzed by the students in HI 217, "US Social History" at Worcester State College in the Spring of 2009.