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The collection is composed primarily of ledgers used in the operation of the New York Juvenile Asylum, a reception center, home, and placement agency for orphaned, abandoned, and impoverished children. The Asylum operated in Manhattan from 1853 until 1905 when it moved to a rural campus in Dobbs Ferry, New York. In 1920 the Asylum was renamed Children's Village. The collection provides copious information about the experience of poor and orphaned children, children sent West on "orphan trains," social work, and the home life and living arrangements of poor and immigrant New Yorkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A small group of materials documenting the history of Letchworth Village, an institutional care facility for children and adults with intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental conditions which operated in Thiells, New York from 1911 until 1996. The materials were collected by the writer Annette Riley Fry in the 1970s, while conducting research for a possible article on Letchworth Village.