General Ely S. Parker to FDG, March 21, 1889

The Frederick Dent Grant (FDG) and Ida Honore Grant (IHG) papers is made up of correspondence, speeches, pamphlets, scrapbooks, poems, news clippings, and other items that documents the lives of General Frederick Grant and his wife Ida Honore Grant. The correspondence in this collection comes from a variety of sources including correspondence related to Fred and Ida's time in Austria as Fred served as Minister to Austria-Hungary. it also includes correspondence from family and friends related to personal and political matters in the lives of the Grants, particularly the death of Fred's father, President Ulysses S. Grant. The items in this collection were donated to the US Grant Presidential Library from several sources, mainly Grant family descendants. The archivists of the USGPL collected the Fred and Ida papers together into one collection from a variety of different collections including the Grant Family Papers, the Speeches and Pamphlets collection, the Scrapbook collection, and the Ida Honore correspondence collection. These items are now back into their original order as a collection of Fed and Ida family papers.

The Ida Honoré Grant Austrian Correspondence, 1889–1893, is a collection of 130 letters written largely by Ida herself and sent to her mother, sister, and other relatives back in the United States. Ida instructed her relatives to save the letters that she wrote to them so that she might have them to remember her stay in Europe after her return home. As she explained in a note that she scrawled at the head of one letter to her mother, "I wish you would just keep my letters, they will serve as [a] sort of 'journal' to me afterwards. I write so much to you all there is nothing left for me to put in a diary" (Ida H. Grant to Ma, May 19, 1889). These items were donated together to the USGPL by a grant family descendent and were digitized by the Library, as such, the archivists kept them in their original order to minimize issues with metadata.

Incoming Austrian correspondence comes from loose items in scrapbooks maintained by Ida Honore Grant prior to and during their time in Austria. The correspondence, calling cards, invitations, announcements, and other items are mostly in German and French, or are congratulatory letters in English from American well-wishers.

The remaining correspondence came from the Grant Family Correspondence collection and is generally family correspondence or correspondence from well-wishers related to the death of President Grant.

Speeches, poems, and pamphlets came from the collection of the same name. This collection was created by the USGPL and contained original hand-written Fred Grant speeches, as well as typewritten speeches, hand-written and published poems about his father's death, and published pamphlets from the 19th and 20th centuries. These items were transferred to the Fred and Ida papers.

Fred and Ida scrapbooks in the USGPL scrapbook collection were transferred to this collection as well. This included the Fred newspaper clipping scrapbooks maintained by Ida from the 1890s to his death in 1912 and the Congratulatory scrapbook from 1889 that contained hundreds of pieces of correspondence (including some from 1885 and 1887) to Fred congratulating him on various awards, including being nominated for Secretary of State of New York and accepting the Mission to Austria. Each letter is identified in the finding aid.