By Donald A. Windsor
Deputy Historian, Chenango County
If you want to know what it is like to live in a distant place, you can visit it or correspond with its residents. But what can you do if you want to know what it was like to live in a distant time?
You can read about it. Publications, such as newspapers, magazines, or books, are good sources of information, but they are polished. They have been sanitized, refined, and edited so that the communication has been rendered fit for public consumption and targeted to a particular audience. However, a lot of information never gets published because the publishers either reject it or are unaware of it.
To get real uncensored, unedited, direct, highly biased, personal information, consider reading diaries. First of all, should you? Do people write diaries for strangers to read? Probably not. As far as I can determine, people write diaries to record events in their lives and their reactions to them for their own personal use, to augment their memories. A diary is, in effect, outsourced memory storage and should be considered an extension of the author’s mind. That is about as personal and private as it gets.
So it is probably unethical to read someone’s diary without their consent. Obtaining consent from someone who is dead is impossible, unless they revealed their intent prior to passing. The saving grace is that reading diaries is painfully boring, so there are no long lines of eager readers. Moreover, they are hand written and often difficult to decipher. In fact, most diaries that have been saved go unread. Which is, of course, ethically irrelevant. However, if authors wanted their diaries to remain private, they would have destroyed them before they died. Their timing would have had to be pretty accurate, because most folks do not know when that final occasion will occur. Meanwhile, as the ethical issues are pondered (or sidestepped), historians find diaries to be veritable gold mines.
On June 1, historians from all over Chenango County met in Norwich to discus diaries. See the article by Wilma Felton-Gray on June 20 for details. Most historians agreed that reading these scribbles can be tedious, but finding a few nuggets of valuable information somehow makes it all worth while.
Seated behind me at the meeting was Sharon Davis, the President of the Greene Historical Society. There she is in the photo. She told us how she received a trunk full of the diaries of William “Will” Ford (1869-1955). Next to her in the photo are a few of Will’s diaries that she was showing me. Sharon has his diaries from 1901 through 1942.
Sharon is seated in what remains of a barn on her former farm. The last time she was in this barn was in 1963. Will shared a farmhouse with her family on Ridge Road (now County Road 2) in the Town of Smithville. She had just shown me the Ford cemetery up the road in the Town of German. Will is not buried there, but in Cincinnatus.
Sharon knew Will personally when she was a young child, but after reading his diaries now knows him quite well. He mentions helping the Temple family, so Sharon asked Bertha Temple Duell, age 103, if she remembered Will. She certainly did and especially how generous he was. Coincidentally, Will’s wife was also named Bertha.
Sharon still has the tea set Will gave her for her eighth birthday. It was ordered from the Sears catalog. In fact, the diaries show that Will was ordering from Sears back in the early 1900s.
Will never used profanity. Even when he shot himself in the foot while climbing over a barnyard fence, he described it as a “confounded stupid thing to do”. When Sharon’s father installed indoor plumbing, Will never used the toilet because “It wasn’t sanitary to have such a contraption inside the house”. You really have to admire a guy like that, especially in the winter!
Diaries are scarce. The main reason is that when their authors die, their heirs discard them as personal trash. Even when they are kept, the heirs in a later generation may discard them. A lot of local history is lost forever due to house cleaning. When old diaries are found, such as in garage sales or trash dumps, they should be donated to an appropriate museum. Sometimes the diary owners move away and take their diaries with them. Diaries from Chenango County can wind up in far away places, such as Arizona or Florida. Diaries from estates are sometimes found for sale on eBay.
I do not like reading diaries but do (on rare occasions) because the author may mention local wild plants and animals. Such was the case with Henry Van Der Lyn’s diaries reported in my article on November 30, 2004. What puzzles me is how seldom wildlife are mentioned. Pages after more pages describe aches, pains, bowel movements (or lack thereof), petty family squabbles, cantankerous disputes with gnarly neighbors, mundane tasks, and the grueling day to day tedium of woefully uninteresting lives. But there are no keen observations of the world surrounding these hapless wretches. Future readers of my diaries will be pleased to note that my wildlife observations are kept separately from my records of daily banality.
Do you keep a diary? Would you want anyone else reading it? What will happen to it after your demise?