The collection consists of personal and professional material. A large portion of the material was obtained from scrapbooks disassembled prior to coming to the Archives. Broad ranges of dates were entered on the scrapbook material by Miss Hawkins and this accounts for the awkward dating on some of the materials. It was not possible to assign exact dates to some of the material.
Box 1 contains awards, general Christmas letters sent out by Hawkins, correspondence (mostly greeting cards and personal notes to Hawkins), miscellaneous papers, newspaper clippings, and information on Grace Pilgrim Bloom. Mrs. Bloom received her Master's degree from UW-River Falls in November of 1972 at the age of 86, making her the oldest graduate ever of the university. Miss Hawkins was Mrs. Bloom's advisor. The information deals with Bloom earning her degree and also correspondence between the two.
The largest part of the collection consists of travel journals written by Miss Hawkins when she took various trips to Europe and Asia. The journals are daily diaries of what she did and whom she saw when on her trip. Also present are photographs, a scrapbook of a trip to New York, and a compiled book of the lectures she gave at National Taiwan Normal University.
Arranged by date and consisting primarily of letters sent to Hawkins by her friends and employers, her correspondence comprises the majority of the 2013 addition. Information in the letters reveals how Hawkins' work as a professor and additional volunteer activities influenced the university. Hawkins' home diaries record both her daily personal and professional activities including the meals she ate, classes she taught, and time she awoke. Her travel diaries also record both her personal and professional activities while she was in various states or countries. In addition to recording personal information, Hawkins often writes about the landscapes and historic scenery she saw and daily news events of her destination. She then used these travel diaries as background material while writing her travel journals that she wrote to formally express how she experienced foreign lands.
