Beyond the Quad

As an Advancement Office Intern, part of my routine is asking Ms. Lord, Associate Director of Advancement, if she has any projects for me to work on. About 70% of the time the job she has me do involves stamps or folding something, but last week she set me on a mission. I love learning about the school’s history and spending time going through our archives, so when Ms. Lord got a call asking if Dublin had any records of a deceased family member, she knew to call me. The call Ms. Lord received was from a woman trying to find information about her father, William Edward Farnell, who she believed attended Dublin in 1953. She had learned that he had attended St. Paul’s School but was left with many unanswered questions after finding out he didn’t graduate from there. She was notified that his family asked to get his transcript sent to Dublin School, so that’s where she went next. Her call got forwarded to the Advancement Office and then on to me.  

Working with the archives can make you feel like a detective, so with a name and an expected graduation year as my clues, I got on the case. The easiest way to find a previous Dubin student is to look in the yearbook. Unfortunately, Dublin’s first real yearbook was published in 1961, well after Mr. Farnell’s time at Dublin. Before the yearbook, Dublin had The Scavenger. The Scavenger was a student published Newsletter/literary magazine/whatever else the students wanted to publish. It had two issues per year, one in the fall and one in the spring. I looked for the editions that were published when Mr. Farnell would have been a student, fall 1952 and spring 1953. I was able to find the fall edition but had no luck with the spring edition. (If you have a copy of the 1953 spring edition please reach out!!!!) Finding a copy of The Scavenger from when Mr. Farnell would have attended, felt like I cracked the case wide open.  Unfortunately, there was not one mention of him in the entire publication. The singular mention is located in a section titled Famous Quotations, and his ‘famous quote’ is:

Bill Farnell's (in)famous quote

While this discovery didn’t shed much light on who Mr. Farnell was, it did confirm that he was at Dublin in 1952. 

The next resource I went to is our collection of photos. The photos are roughly split up by decade, that is except for photos from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, which are all in the same box, so I had a lot of photos to leaf through. My hope was that I would find a photo where someone had identified him or maybe an all-class photo that featured him. Yet again, I had no luck.

William Farnell’s Alumni Profile is marked as non-graduate, but with limited resources left, I went to see if Paul Lehman had written him a note for his graduation, just in case. Mr. Lehman wrote a short speech to read for every student that graduated while he was head of school, and to my surprise, I found it! While this doesn’t 100% confirm that Mr. Farnell did graduate from Dublin, it does make it seem likely. Another bit of evidence that Mr. Farnell graduated is that he said it himself! I was able to find letters that he had written to the school from 1989 inquiring about visiting campus. 

After I properly searched all corners of the school’s archives, I sent what I had to Mr. Farnell’s daughter. While not every mystery surrounding William Edward Farnell was solved, being able to turn into an archive detective and helping a daughter learn more about her father’s story was incredibly fulfilling. 

This case is not yet solved!!! If you have any information about William Farnell or have a case of your own for Sarah to solve, please reach out to alumni@dublinschool.org. 

-Sarah M. '26, Advancement Intern