If you ask most people what they think about history they will say, “boring.” Because to them history is all about memorizing useless dates. But to me it’s not boring. History is about people: people who walked, talked, worked, played and lived the ups and downs of life in bygones days. History helps bring these people to life.
I’m fortunate to have a diary of my Great-Great Aunt Josie Thralls that covers a couple of years of her life from 1882-1884. She was an older sister of my maternal Great Grandmother Mayme Thralls Miller and was 17-19 years old during the time she wrote her diary.
In her first entry she wrote about starting a diary with her innermost thoughts that no one but her would read. Little could she image that over 130 years later her great-great niece would read the diary.
A lot of what she wrote is about the mundane every day things we all do day in and day out during our lifetime. Intertwined with the mundane she wrote about friends and relatives, what she could do to better herself, a ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone for the new courthouse, a 4th of July celebration, courting, dances, sicknesses and injuries, attending the fair, her sister’s engagement, starting school for bookkeeping, and much more.
The main form of communicating with her friends and relatives in other cities was via writing letters. According to her diary she was a very active letter writer. The telephone was in its infancy so was not very common, but she does mention it once. So news, both good and bad, traveled much slower back then.
The saddest entry was on the 9th anniversary (June 10th, 1882) of her mother’s death. Her mother died from complications of birth a month after her sister May, my Great Grandmother Miller, was born. She wrote about that dreadful day of her mother’s death. She was only 8 years old and was walking to school when she was told to return home because her mom had taken a turn for the worse. On her way back home she picked up her younger brother, Bert, who was out picking whortleberries. Here are her words: “How well I remember that walk or rather run as we came back together, Bertie’s piteous sobbings as I urged him to hurry. And then when we reached home, the kind neighbors who had come in, papa’s violent grief as he begged but one word from mama’s lips, so soon to be sealed by the icy seal of death. Uncle Mike held me up in his arms to give my mama her last earthly kiss. O! darling mama how I miss you.” I had tears the first time I read this entry. I felt her grief, her pain.
Later in her diary, in 1884, she wrote with an air of excitement about how they had moved from Warsaw, Indiana to Houston, Florida in the late fall of 1883 via a train. Her sister, Grace, and brother, Bert, didn’t make the move. I want so much to know more about her time in Florida but sadly the diary abruptly ends with only two entries written in Florida.
Reading the diary gave me a snippet of Aunt Josie and what it was like living during the 1880’s. She was only 34 when she died in 1899, but a part of her life lives on in her diary.
History: it’s about people!
P.S. I didn’t think about including these pictures when I wrote this blog:
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