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Explore Chepstow’s Ties to America’s Founding Families

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What you need to know

Chepstow 120 Narragansett Ave
Newport, RI 02840
October 8 – 15, 2026 11:00am – 12:00pm
Thursdays
  • $20 Members
  • $25 Non-members

Program Dates

The Days in which this program will be held: Thursday, October 8, 2026
Thursday, October 12, 2026

Preservation Society Archives Fellow Grace Acton highlights connections between the Morris family archives and furnishings collected by Alletta Morris McBean at Chepstow.

Get to know the people behind the paintings, documents and decor on view at Chepstow. From religious leaders to revolutionaries, politicians to socialites, learn about the many ways that Mrs. McBean’s ancestors influenced American history, and how the women of Chepstow preserved their family history for future generations.

Grace Acton

GraceActon_Headshot_1

Preservation Society Archival Research Fellow

Grace Acton, Preservation Society Archival Research Fellow, graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Interdisciplinary Studies from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and earned an MA with Distinction in Digital Humanities from Lancaster University, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal and Iredell Prize. In addition to her coursework, Grace has excelled in roles which require critical thinking and data analysis to address complex collections management problems as a Synergy Collections Management Intern for Bates College Museum of Art, Collections Steward and Digitization Intern for the Maine Maritime Museum, and Dorothy W. Sanborn Summer Intern at the Rufus Porter Museum of Art and Ingenuity.

Acton has also presented at numerous conferences, offering papers which demonstrate her facility with archives management and digital humanities, such as “Into the Zooniverse: Crowdsourcing Data for the Bates Museum of Art Collection” at the 2023 Bates College Mount David Summit; and “Rufus’s Adventures in Cyberspace: Bringing Rufus Porter School Art into the World of Digital History” as a webinar for the Rufus Porter Museum of Art and Ingenuity.

She is a member of the New England Archivists, Society of American Archivists and Digital Preservation Coalition; is conversational in Russian and biliterate in Spanish; and programs in R and HTML/XML.

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