Of particular interest are financial and legal records such as deeds, wills, and estate inventories. Separate from the family papers is a collection of account books and diaries. The former warrants special mention as it forms a particularly large, diverse, and important aggregation. The finding aids at PVMA usually offer folder-level description, though some collections do have more extensive finding aids. Within these collections, material is most often arranged by individual family member.
Correspondence is placed with the individual to whom it was addressed, rather than with the author.
Because personal papers generally relate to families with a Deerfield connection, the collections themselves are interrelated. These collections have been used extensively for genealogical research some were even assembled for the express purpose of conducting that kind of research. In general, the presence of genealogical material is noted in the contents field, but often being of a much later date than the manuscript material in the collection, its presence is not taken into consideration when determining a date span. Genealogical concerns have influenced decisions of where to place a given individual's papers. In particular, this means that a married woman's papers are usually placed with the papers of her husband's family.