Jim, re Child, you are correct. He was Professor of Literature at Harvard where he worked extremely hard. Almost all of his spare time was spent on his family, his beloved rose garden and researching and editing the ballads. The sophisticated circles he moved in would have excluded any knowledge of ballads being sung in the community around him. Towards the end of his life he came into contact with people who sent him ballads taken down in America and these he included in his appendixes. The vast bulk of the versions he edited were sent from Britain by correspondents, and the majority of these came from manuscripts and published works.