Papers belonging to the Spence and Lowell families of New England.

The Spence family of New Hampshire was related to the Lowells of Massachusetts by the marriage of Keith Spence and Mary Traill. Keith Spence (died approximately 1810), merchant of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, served as purser onboard the Ganges, Constellation, and Philadelphia, during the Quasi-War with France and Tripolitan War, taking part in naval operations in the West Indies and the Mediterranean. In 1798, he was captured by a French privateer and released in 1799. With the Constellation, he took part in the 1802 voyage and the blockade of Tripoli. Spence was captured on October 31, 1803, when the Philadelphia ran aground off Tripoli and was released in June 1805. In 1806, he went to Havana, and from 1807 to 1810 served as Navy agent in New Orleans. Spence's wife Mary Traill Spence (died 1824) was related to the Brackett, Whipple, and Lowell families. Among her relatives were William Whipple, signer of the Declaration of Independence, his brother Joseph Whipple, Joshua Brackett, a leading Portsmouth physician and patriot, the Rev. John Lowell of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Judge John Lowell (1743-1802). Harriet Brackett Spence, daughter of Keith Spence and Mary Traill Spence, married Charles Lowell (1782-1861), pastor of the West Unitarian Church in Boston, son of Judge John Lowell. Among their six children were James Russell Lowell, the poet, abolitionist, and diplomat, and Mary Traill Spence Lowell, a scholar, traveler, and a popular anonymous novelist. Her son William Lowell Putnam was killed at Ball's Bluff in 1861.

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