Deborah Pickman Clifford, 75, historian of the 19th century

DEBORAH P. CLIFFORD

Shards of history are often found in old letters, their yellowing corners curving from the passage of time. Deborah Pickman Clifford read sheaves of ancient correspondence as she wrote biographies of three powerful women from the 19th century, and she pored over half-forgotten town records and time-worn manuscripts in pursuit of the telling detail, the illuminating anecdote.

Not content to simply comb through the usual troves of literary and scholarly material, she pointed out in a review published in the journal Vermont History five years ago that historians sometimes neglect an obvious resource.

"Much valuable historical material is contained in those stories that have been passed down orally from one generation to the next," Ms. Clifford wrote. "Folklore, after all, has been the traditional way of recalling the customs, beliefs, and traditions of our forebears, and these accounts, which tell us so much about the culture of bygone times, cannot be too easily dismissed."

As a biographer and a critic, a historian and a scholar, she brought stories of the 19th century to life in books and articles she began publishing in her 40s while raising four daughters. Ms. Clifford died Friday in Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vt., of a rare angiopathic disorder. She was 75 and had lived in New Haven, Vt.

"She was very careful and worked rather slowly, because she really liked to get all her ducks in a row before she wrote anything," Nicholas Clifford, a professor emeritus at Middlebury College in Vermont, said of his wife. "She'd hear about another collection of papers that she thought she ought to go look at and off she would go."

Such thoroughness drew praise from the likes of Jay Parini, the poet, biographer, and critic who teaches at Middlebury. Parini wrote that in her biography "Crusader for Freedom," Ms. Clifford "performed an extraordinary act of cultural excavation . . . which summons the life and world of Lydia Maria Child with novelistic skill and power."

Child, an abolitionist and women's rights advocate, was born in Medford and is remembered for her poem that begins, "Over the river and through the woods." In the introduction to her book on Child, published in 1992, Ms. Clifford wrote about the excitement and challenges biographers face.

The first details she learned about her subject "brought to mind just the sort of feisty, independent woman I liked," Ms. Clifford wrote. "She would, I was certain, be good company. Over a decade later, I am forced to admit that writing this life of Child has proved to be a long, arduous, and often discouraging task. There were many times when the challenge of making sense out of this paradoxical, often maddeningly evasive woman tempted me to lay the whole project aside. But since I share some of Child's stubbornness, I persisted."

"Crusader for Freedom" was Ms. Clifford's second biography. Her first was "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," published in 1979, about her great-grand-aunt Julia Ward Howe, a 19th century abolitionist who spent much of her life in Boston and is known for writing the lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Ms. Clifford's third biography, "The Passion of Abby Hemenway," on the 19th century Vermont historian, was published in 2001. Two years ago, she and her husband co-wrote and published "The Troubled Roar of the Waters: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927-1931."

In her biography of Hemenway, Ms. Clifford began the first chapter with a quote from her subject: "The child that has an intellectual mother is twice mothered." By that measure, Deborah Pickman was twice mothered and twice fathered as the youngest child of Edward M. Pickman, a historian and music patron in Boston, and Hester Chanler Pickman, an artist and translator.

The youngest of six children, she was born in Boston and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for a couple of years before switching to Radcliffe College, from which she graduated in 1957 with an honors degree in history. While at Radcliffe, she met Nicholas Clifford.

"We got married in the old-fashioned style, days after she was out of college," he said.

Over the next several years, Ms. Clifford raised their daughters while he finished his doctorate and began teaching. In 1966, the family moved to Cornwall, Vt., when he was hired by Middlebury College.

Ms. Clifford had already begun writing when she returned to college and received a master's in American history from the University of Vermont in 1974, when she was 41.

"She was always very disciplined about setting aside time for her work and had huge amounts of support from my father, which made that possible," said their daughter, Sarah Laughlin of Philadelphia. "They were a team."

As her daughters grew older, Ms. Clifford devoted more time to writing and became president in the early 1980s of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury and the Vermont Historical Society.

In 1993, Deborah and Nicholas Clifford moved about 13 miles north in Vermont to a house a son-in-law designed for them in New Haven. In light of her unexpected illness, he said, their time working on a book together was a gift.

"It was wonderful for the two of us to work on this book together," he said. "Every night we talked about the subject, about history, about how you approach it. We'd talked about doing something like this for years, but either she was working on something or I was working on something. I'm so glad it happened."

In addition to her husband and daughter, Ms. Clifford leaves three other daughters, Mary Tittmann of Cambridge, Susannah Blachly of Marshfield, Vt., and Rebecca Clifford of Florence; two sisters, Margaret Oakley of Cambridge, and Martha Baltzell of Philadelphia; two brothers, Anthony Pickman of Lincoln and David Pickman of Bedford; four grandsons; and two granddaughters.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. today in Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Middlebury, Vt. Burial will be in Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Vt.