Joanna Carver Colcord

Early life Source:

Both of Colcord's parents, Jane French (Sweetser) and Captain Lincoln Alden Colcord, came from Maine families with generations-long traditions of life on and around the sea.

Aside from time spent on shore at Penobscot Bay or in Searsport, Maine,

Beginning in 1902,

Career in social work Colcord’s career began in 1911 with a position at the New York Charity Organization Society (COS). During her time there, she also worked with the American Red Cross in the Virgin Islands from 1920 to 1921. In 1925, she left the COS to become General Secretary of the Minnesota Family Welfare Association. In 1929, she became the head of the Charity Organization Division at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, a position she held until 1945. She was an advocate of professional training and standards in her field, as well as scientific research and administration. During the Great Depression she advocated for private social work to support federal relief and welfare provisions, and during the New Deal, she became a liaison between private social work and the federal government’s welfare and relief administrators. She eventually became critical of certain aspects of the Roosevelt administration's categorical approach to relief, raising concerns about issues in public provision and other related areas.

Late life Health problems, including circulatory problems and diabetes, forced Colcord to retire in 1944. In November 1950, she married longtime friend and colleague Frank J. Bruno, a professor of applied sociology at Washington University in St. Louis who had become a widower several months before. After Bruno's death in 1955, Colcord moved to Lebanon, Indiana to live with her stepson. She died there in 1960 from a stroke. In 1945 she published Sea Language Comes Ashore, and she was also the author of various articles published in the maritime journal The American Neptune.

Social work

Life at sea

—— (2003). Letters From Sea: Joanna and Lincoln Colcord’s Seafaring Childhood. Parker Bishop Albee Jr. (editor). Thomaston: Tilbury House.