Correspondence and ephemera collected by a San Francisco certified public accountant, Republican Party member, and California state assemblyman

Atkinson was born in New Jersey and came to California with his family in 1863. He opened a bookkeeping office in San Francisco in 1876. He married Julia Etta Allen in 1877 and they had one son, Harold. Thomas worked for the federal government and the California state government, as well as introducing the double entry bookkeeping system to the City and County of San Francisco in 1893. Atkinson remarried in 1895; his second wife was Martha Staniar, and they had one daughter, Muriel. Atkinson became a certified public accountant in 1901. He started his career with the California State Assembly in 1885 as a minute clerk, and was engrossing clerk there in 1895. He was elected member of the Assembly in 1905, and was speaker pro-tem in that year, as well as during the extra session of the thirty-sixth assembly in 1906. Atkinson was active in the relief work done in San Francisco following the 1906 disaster. By 1910 he and his family had moved to Oakland, and he died there in 1923.

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