Papers of Anne Dever Engelhart, 1933-2018

Archivist and librarian Anne Engelhart was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1951, the eldest child of Carl and Margaret Engelhart. In that year the couple moved to Plattsburgh, New York, where her father began a long career in the English department at the State University of New York. Her mother later served as an editor for Tundra Books, a Canadian publishing company. She had three younger brothers: Steven, Scott, and Matthew. Her parents later became the guardians of the five children (Barbara, Elizabeth, Geoff, Daniel, Deborah) of their dear friends, George and Dorothy Yokum, when the Yokums died in 1963.

The family traveled widely, living in Germersheim, Germany (1958-1959) and in Graz, Austria (1967-1968) where her father taught as part of the Fulbright program. Her parents also lived in Hull, England (1975-1976) and Tianjin, China (1985-1986); in 1986 she and other family members spent a month with them in China.

An avid flute player, Engelhart studied at Vassar College (1969-1971) before leaving for Europe where she became involved in the study of Renaissance and baroque music and historically informed performance practice, attending the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basel, Switzerland), the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and studying with baroque flutist Barthold Kuijken while living in Brugge, Belgium. In 1975 she returned to the United States and studied at Brandeis University (1975-1976) before finishing at New England Conservatory (BM 1978). In 1984 she completed an MLIS from Simmons and in 1992 she received an MLA in history from the Harvard Extension School. In 1978 she married Douglas Durant, a doctoral candidate in music whom she'd met at Brandeis. The couple have two children.

Inspired by her experience in working with original manuscript material in Europe, she began part-time work at the Schlesinger Library in 1977, initially as a staff assistant for the Black Women Oral History Project, and later as Assistant Curator of Manuscripts, and Head of Collection Services before retiring in 2018.

She and her husband were friends with Trude Rittmann, a German Jewish composer who fled the Nazis in 1933 and eventually settled in New York City where she was an essential member of the community of artists creating ballets and musical theater, working with Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Frederick Loewe, and Richard Rodgers, among others. At the end of Rittmann's life they served as her health care proxies and caretakers.